The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Dec 2009
Interview
One screening phone interview with recruiter, on-site interview thereafter with 6 engineers at Googleplex. All the engineers looked very smart but the interview questions were somewhat consistent (Big O notation and hash table) and not practical in real scenarios. They definitely look for particular engineers and they basically have no interest in your past experience. Not recommended for career development.
The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Google in Sep 2009
Interview
While working at Google may (or may not) be great fun, the interview process there is much less so. After a very technical phone interview, my in person interview was all about tricky logic problems with no focus on the engineering process itself (optimal card shuffling, How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?,etc.)
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Jun 2008
Interview
I had two rounds of phone interviews. In the first round the interviewer asked me about my current experience, motivation to work in google etc. I believe this was mostly to get an understanding of who should be interviewing me. In the second round, the interview was mostly technical. I was asked some coding questions, questions about memory management, and data structures.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked a question about the following. If a user types in a n digit number on the telephone, how do you write a function to deduce if the number constitutes a valid word. For example, if the user enters 123, then can a valid word be made out of (a/b/c) + (d/e/f) + (g/h/i)