WHEN Nikesh Arora was approached to join Google, he got the strangest request.

“I was asked: ‘Ever been to the British Museum? Sergey Brin and Larry Page will meet you there.’ My job interview took place walking around the exhibits.”

That was in 2004, when Brin and Page were in town on other business. Sixteen interviews later — Google likes top appointments to be approved by all senior staff — Arora got the job, heading the assault of the world’s biggest media company on what could become its most lucrative region: Europe.

His task as head of European operations isn’t easy, however. Arora — Indian-born, US-educated and with stints at Fidelity Investments and T Mobile on his CV — has to start squeezing money out of Google’s flurry of internet service launches. And he hasn’t even got a background in internet sales.

“Another Google executive pointed that out at an interview,” grins Arora, “but he added, ‘that’s the good news, because at Google we hire people with raw smarts’.”

Which means? “It’s foolish to try to predict the way business will change, so if somebody has got ‘raw smarts’ they can adapt to new offerings and the Google way of doing business.”

That’s the company approach: confident in its own brainpower — some would say arrogant — and happy to rewrite the business rulebook in its drive to spot opportunity and organise information online.

It will suit Arora, described by former colleagues at T-Mobile as bright, restless and very ambitious.

Rich from his time as a top-rated analyst in America, he drives a Porsche, lives in London’s Knightbridge and plays golf at Wentworth. He is also a regular face in trendy Asian eateries such as Hakkasan and Zuma, where he is not afraid to man the pans for the odd newspaper photoshoot.

Such well-connected quirkiness is right up Google’s street. Arora had already leapt from Boston to Bonn before landing in London as a telecoms executive. He had left T-Mobile to launch his own business when Brin and Page snaffled him up.

Sitting in the Axis restaurant at London’s One Aldwych hotel, Arora looks more conventional than Google’s T-shirt-loving founders. Aged 37, tall, clean-cut and of almost military bearing (his father was an air vice-marshall in the Indian air force) he is wearing a spotless suit and tie, a reassuring front for those businesses that Google is keen to partner in Europe.

“Google is about being unconventional within bounds,” he says. “It’s about doing things for the right reasons, not for normative reasons, and not doing evil, about challenging the norm.”

The company still wants to be paid by advertisers, of course, and Arora has been hired with hard-edged commercialism in mind. This winter he drew criticism for axing conventional commissions paid to ad agencies booking client ads on Google. More tough decisions will follow.