Google vs eBay Netball Challenge: The Re-Mix

Posted by Christine Knight, Creative Maximiser (retail, media and entertainment team)

After our crushing defeat to the advanced netball forces of eBay in May, we were keen to challenge the eBayers to a rematch to prove our supremacy on the netball court.

With new team members recruited since the last event, and the will to get back our trophy, we threw down the gauntlet once more.

The big rematch took place on December 12. eBayers turned out in large numbers to support their team, including Simon Smith, eBay VP. (Simon was also kind enough to run our half-time auction of a Google Doodle signed by the Google Doodler, Dennis Hwang). In addition to the Doodle auction, we held a half-time shooting competition, with the money raised from both events (over $2000) going to the RSPCA.

The eBay team started the game hard and fast, trying to wear us down with their superior fitness. They took an early advantage of four points while we Googlers were still finding our feet.

Further into the quarter though, we made our comeback, gaining a small lead and keeping it for the rest of the game.

Finally, victory and a large shiny trophy were ours. A fitting end to 2007!

Google centre, Foxy, and eBay centre, Phuong, try intimidation tactics before the game.

Action close-up!

Wrestling the trophy back from eBay

Smiling, happy Googlers and eBayers

A change is as good as a holiday

Posted by Carl Sjogreen, Group Product Manager, Australia & New Zealand

With summer holidays coming up, I regret to say that we aren't slowing down - we continue to work on finding the best ways to make your experience on Google as easy and useful as possible. To this end, you might have noticed a slight change to the Google Australia homepage to help you better navigate our site and find the information you're looking for.

We have introduced a new navigation bar at the top of the page to provide easier navigation to your favorite Google products, such as Google Maps and our popular email product, Gmail.

As well as being able to use this bar to navigate to your favourite Google products, using this navigation bar, you can "drill down" to specific types of information when you search. For instance, if you search for [Great Barrier Reef], you can click on the links for "web," "images", "maps, "news", "video" and "more" (under which you can see results in books, blogs, scholarly articles and more) to immediately find more results.

This is part of our vision of consistent navigation across all Google search properties. We recognise that the search result you are looking for may not be a web page - it may be a geographic location, a news article, an image, a blog post, a video or in a book. The new navigation bar makes it easier for you to find exactly what you want with a single click of the mouse.

Hope you find the new look and feel useful and, as always, feedback is most welcome!