I was contacted through LinkedIn by a recruiter. After giving them a few references from friends who work at Google, I was able to bypass the phone screen. My friends said they received a form that they filled out.

Even then, I was passed around to at least four different recruiters by the time I was actually onsite. I was interviewed by six people, plus the lunch person who had no say in the process.

Three of the interviewers asked me to code on a whiteboard, and three did not. I thought that was odd; I had expected all of them to ask me to code. I made the mistake of making Google my first interview in seven years, so I made silly errors.

Overall, it wasn't as dreadful as others described it.

Nothing unexpected, the recruiters sent materials to review.

Definitely go through sample problems from the CTCI book and Elements of Programming Interviews.

C++ and Java work best for these questions. Actually, C++ works the best since Java can be very verbose at times.