*Based on search volume.

In an effort to both ride the trending wave of March Madness and to promote Google+, the search engine–never forget your core, folks–has posted their March Madness picks, and as the asterisks demonstrate, their winner, as well as any bracket advancement for any team in the Dance, is based on the amount of search engine queries each team generates.

As you can probably tell from the lead image, Kentucky is Google’s “winner,” but unlike an actual basketball game, no “scores” were revealed, meaning, the amount of queries each advancing team was responsible for was not posted.

Click here to see Google’s entire bracket.

Google+ is also an incredibly-prominent feature on the College Hoops 2012 page, and each team that has a Google+ account has a G+ icon by their name. Naturally, the icon links to the respective team G+ page. Google has also included a feed of March Madness mentions on Google+, and they encouraging the use of the #GoogleHoops hashtag whenever you post about the Tournament on your G+ page.

Another Google+ promotion includes an upcoming schedule of Hangouts related to college basketball, and in a hopeful attempt to add incentive, Google has recruited ESPN analyst Doug Gottlieb to participate. Once the G+ promotion aspect of the page is through, it becomes even more useful, offering visitors a downloadable copy of Zagat’s guide to Winning Spots for College Basketball Fans. There’s also a Google Maps link of all the arenas that will be hosting the NCAA Basketball Tournament, as well as the locations of schools playing the Tournament.

Screenshot time:

Lastly, there’s a Google Earth virtual tour of the various arenas, of which, Google made a YouTube video: