I was asked:

"How many mini shampoo bottles should you order annually if you owned every hotel in California."

The reason for questions like these is not to see what answer you come up with, but how you reach it. It's also a cool hack because you can get a good idea of how creative someone is in just 15 minutes.

It's also a bit of a personality test. My interviewer said that about 20% of people won't even try or get frustrated and angry after just a few minutes.

It lets them eliminate everyone except people who are really good at answering these types of questions. I've heard that Larry and Sergey have proudly stated that they wouldn't make it through Google's current hiring process.

Guess Google is not looking for talent that compliments the founders. Seems like a crazy strategy to me.

But everyone that works for Google is obscenely, certifiably smart. It's not a bad trade-off.

I've always wondered though, does smart == innovative?

If it did they wouldn't be interviewing. They'd be starting up. They may be missing balls,perspective, or both.

There's several questions in there related to probability. I think that's pretty important to a lot of what Google does.