I can verify, anecdotally. A friend of mine got a full time offer from Google a couple months ago and accepted right away. He's been told won't find out his team until just before starting in June (or July?).
These things change dramatically over time, and as you can imagine, mitigating circumstances and experience can make one candidate's experience vastly different from another's.
One thing I'd like to remind everyone about is that I'm writing about a time long gone. Trying to guess what Google today does based on what Google did 5-6 years ago brings to mind the adage: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
These days there are multiple levels of hiring committee, plus comp, plus Page. Sure some parts are "automatic" but they add useless weeks onto a slow bureaucracy meanwhile goog loses great candidates to companies which move faster. Sure there's a luxury of being the "best place to work" but the cream of the crop are the least willing to wait.
