I was approached by a Google recruiter, with whom I had an email exchange, followed by a very pleasant phone conversation, all about my interests and history. I then received a very detailed email with a lot of material for applicants, including videos by interviewers explaining what they are looking for. I later had a technical phone interview, using a Googledoc for collaborative editing. I had to write some code. I was then invited to their Tel Aviv office, for a rather hectic day with 5 interviews, each by one person. There was another person whose sole responsibility was to go to lunch with me. Apparently, if I had had a contact in Google, they would have asked them to accompany me. One of the interviewers asked me rather unfair C++ trivia questions, but all the rest only asked me programming, design, algorithm etc. questions. One interview was conducted entirely in English, even though both I and the interviewer speak fluent Hebrew. I imagine that this was meant to gauge my level of English.