Yes, Larry Page’s first crawler was in Java, and Scott Hassan rewrote it in Python. From https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-excerpt-googl

Yes, Larry Page’s first crawler was in Java, and Scott Hassan rewrote it in Python. From https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-excerpt-google https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...: > Scott Hassan: In the fall of ’95, for some reason, I started hanging out with Larry in his office. . . . At the time, Larry was trying to download a hundred pages simultaneously. And I was fixing some of the bugs that he was having with Java itself, and this went on for weeks, if not months. And I remember thinking, Wow, this is insane!, because I was spending a lot of time fixing this underlying tool. And so one weekend, I just took all his code, I took his whole entire thing, and threw it all out, and rewrote the thing that he’s been working on for months very quickly—over a weekend—because I was just sick and tired of it. I knew I could get the thing working if I used a language I knew very well, called Python. I wrote it in such a way that it could download 32,000 pages simultaneously. So Larry went from barely downloading a 100, to doing 32,000 [pages] simultaneously on a single machine.