I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Google in Dec 2014
Interview
Asked about items on my resume, then went straight into a series of technical questions. Three interviews in one three-hour period. The questions were moderately difficult, standard tech questions you would find from any other company. The people who were calling were Software Engineers themselves and very friendly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you detect whether a string is an anagram of a palindrome?