I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Google in Dec 2016
Interview
Started with an online coding sample (2 problems-90min) to help the recruiters gauge your programming skills. Followed by two technical phone interviews(45min).
In both cases the questions were relatively simple. They are similar to what one would find online.
The interviewers were very nice and tried their best to guide me when I was stuck.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Google in Jan 2017
Interview
Referred by Google employee; completed online coding test, and then had two phone screens. The questions were hard, but honestly, not impossible and very doable overall. I highly recommend scheduling your Google interview after some other interviews so you have practice. If I had scheduled mine just a few weeks later, when I had already faced similar interviews at many other companies, I'm confident I would've passed the interview. The questions weren't out-of-this-world difficult. I heard that I was rejected about two weeks after my interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions on graph searching (think DFS, BFS), tree traversal (think inorder, preorder, postorder), array and string manipulation
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google in Nov 2016
Interview
I first applied online, didn't hear back for two weeks. Then I had a internal referral at Google. Once he asked for my resume and updated in the database, I was contacted by a recruiter. I did two back-to-back phone interviews, but got an email that they will not move forward further on the next day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a function and efficient data structure to compute the inner product of two sparse vectors.