West Virginia-Duke sports bet uses Google as bait

Morgantown Mayor Bill Byrne’s local team, the West Virginia University Mountaineers, will be facing Duke University in the NCAA men’s basketball semifinals in Indianapolis on Saturday.

If WVU defeats Duke, Bell will write a letter on mayor's stationery endorsing Morgantown's application for super-high-speed Internet connections from Google, Byrne said in a press release.

"If they win, I'll do the same for him," he said.

Google is planning to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. The connections would deliver Internet at more than one gigabit per second, or more than 100 times faster than most Americans currently receive.

"We're trying to use this opportunity to talk about our communities and how important this is for economic development," Byrne said.

Google is expected to announce the trial locations by the end of the year.