I applied to Google through an employee referral and heard back from a recruiter within a week of them receiving my resume.

The process was pretty quick and easy, with only a few required forms prior to my phone screening.

The phone interview was a simple data structure question requiring approximately 25 lines of Java code. After the interview, I was offered to fly to Mountain View for an on-site interview.

This consisted of four 45-minute interviews, plus an hour for lunch. All of them were algorithm/data structure questions (trees, graphs, arrays), so I can't comment on the nature of design-style questions.

In two of these interviews, I successfully answered the first question and was asked a second. In one interview, I answered the first question and we discussed my resume for the remaining time. The final interview was a bit more tricky, requiring careful handling of edge cases, so I got a bit mixed up and wasn't able to fully complete the problem (I did have a full whiteboard of code by the end of it).

I felt good about the interview but was notified 2.5 weeks later that the hiring committee decided not to continue the process. My recruiter suggested I get more experience but cited no more reasons beyond that.

Data structures and algorithms are a must. The most complicated algorithm one might use in these sorts of interviews is Dijkstra's (all of my questions were simpler, though).

Get used to coding on a whiteboard and be sure to understand the problem fully before jumping into the code. Bring thin-chisel markers, especially if you anticipate writing a couple of long lines of code.