I was going through a conversion interview so my interview experience was likely different. Had a few standard programming questions (1 was to maintain stats on a hourly, minute, and day granularity and the other was a variant of a hash table design). I had to negotiate a lot but it had a huge impact on my offer. I also had competing offers from Facebook, DropBox, and a startup.
Their standard process: Applied on line through their website, was contacted by their recruiter within 3 days for initial talks, set up the phone interview for the next week which was technical and involved solving one programming question, called on site for 5 back to back technical interviews with their programmers. It was a good experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Calculate the point when the time/space complexity for a merge sort would be as good/bad as a insertion sort for given values for step executions.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google
Interview
Contacted by recruiter. Send my CV to recruiter which was reviewed by engineers. Schedule telephone interview with engineer through HR department. Interview was conducted by phone through a shared Google Docs documents.