Google Software Developer Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round: Test
Experience: I was asked to take the test at 8.30 pm. They fixed this test, a week back. Nobody will call you to remind you to take test. Nor the interviewer will call you. It is your responsibility to check ur mail without fail. On that day I was expecting a call from google from evening till 8.25 pm. None called me. I thought that they would have forgot that. I planned to do go out and have food. But suddenly my ipad gave a alert message and it was from gmail app [thanks for ipad, or else i would not have checked my mail in lap top]. It was from google recruiter. The mail stated that he has shared a doc with me and i must answer the questions in it. a google drive link was given. he mentioned that the test was for 2 hours. I was asked to type answers just below each of these questions.
Duration: 120 minutes

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: Since I had prepared for tech interviews like amazon, I was able to do it good.After a week I got a call from HR and informed that I cleared the first round. Then after two days I was told that i will have a telephonic interview with one of the google developers from adwords team . They scheduled a telephonic interview the next week

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: 1) How will improve the revenue of the cafeteria of the office. Lots of discussions went and i think, i really did that well.
2)[Actual question which i screwed up. Bad Time for me]
Number of users in 2001 for adwords, chrome, gmail, android and picassa are in the ratio of 6:9:14:13:8, and in 2004 we add 3 lakh more users. New ratio is 8:12:13:11:6. Number of picassa users in 2004= 1,44,000. Calculate number of adwords users in 2005.A basic math question that, even a school student can solve. But in that tension i was not able to do it. I took some time and finally gave him a answer. I myself knew that it would be wrong. But interviewer said great lets move on to next question[just to boost up me - good person].My actual job role revolves around developing tools for the the ad review team which will review the ad and reject illlegal ones. So third question was related to that .He told me that as I am from a tech background, I need to explain him technically wat will I do. He also said that he did not need the actual solution. They will just see the way I approach the problem. That an existing problem and they are open to suggestions.3)In google adwords there are about 30 million ads from 42 lanuages . What will I do review the ads and reject ads that do not comply with specific rules .Regarding the criteria under which google bans a ad as illegal – I discussed about different criteria .Out of the criteria’s i told , he asked me to consider only three criteria .
a) Link not working
b) Drug related ads
c) trademarks[trademark used by the companies]I gave lot of approaches like for link not workinga) designing a autobot which will automatically click ads link and check whether it is redirecting to correct page or not . Autobots are used by hackers to get money for the ads they posted . I suggested that by designing similar autobot we can validate the link.b) to check drug related ads -
To detect the language we can first check the geographic location from which the ad is getting posted and can narrow down to some less choices from which we can detect the language
i suggested him that we can create a trie which some specific keywords (like coccaine ) and do pattern matching with that and reject the add it contains any of the works in trie .The interviewer gave me another constraint wat if there comes a ad “coccaine rehabilitation center” we should reject those kind of ads na . thats for a good cause . So i suggested him that i can maintain another set of trie which can contain those set of keywords.Fist check trie1 if drug related keywords exist .
Next check trie 2 if other types of keyword exist.
– if keyword only present in trie1 [reject ad]
– if both tire return true [can reject . but its better that those ad's alone can be subjected to manual evaluation for rejection].I used trie as it can do the pattern matches faster .For trademarks also I discussed using similar datastructures and the interviewer was ok with my answer.

General Tips: I applied for a job in Google jobs page. I know that its very difficult that a resume gets noticed by google.Suddenly one fine day i got a call from Google HR saying that they are interested in my profile and asked me if, i was ready to go with the interview process[Come on! who will say no for Google]. I was surprised.I was asked to take a initial screen test [Online test].
Skills: data structure, Algorithm
College Name: na

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - good

Topics to prepare for Google Software Developer interview:

• Core Java
• Advanced Java
• MySQL

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Consider what you enjoy doing and what makes you happy.