I had two technical interviews.

The first one was a standard interview on algorithms. The interviewer was very friendly and cheerful. I solved the problems in 20 minutes, and he was impressed. After that, we talked for 15 minutes about Google and his job.

The second interviewer had read one of my research papers (which was a pleasant surprise) and asked me questions about it. He inquired about certain assumptions and asked me to explain some phenomena. Then, he asked how I would measure the quality of a search engine as perceived by users. This was an open-ended question, and we discussed many different approaches. He was more serious compared to the first interviewer, but he was also very helpful, and I enjoyed his questions a lot.

After the interviews, my recruiter contacted me in less than 24 hours to let me know that I had passed the technical interviews. Of course, I knew this :)

The next stage was the host matching process. It took about 10-14 days to have an interview with a potential host. I had three of these. Two of the projects were very interesting, and I got the one I liked the most. One of these interviewers (the one I chose) had also read one of my research papers and wanted to know more.

Overall, I was impressed at how seriously these people take the interviews and that they spent time to read about my research and ask relevant questions related to it. Other companies would just give standard algorithm interview questions, but Googlers went beyond that. They don't just say they care about their employees; they show you they care.

I didn't expect questions about my research, but I was pleasantly surprised. The questions were more on how I think about a problem and my approach to problem-solving outside the box. Some of the questions were quite complicated, but I enjoyed every one of them.