From my perspective, python was just starting to gain real popularity in the mid 2000s, more than half a decade after Google was founded...

I first started using Python slightly after that time and for years it was a pretty niche language that relatively few people used, especially compared to the other 'P' languages, Perl and PHP. I'd estimate 2001-2002 as when it would say it started to become a 'normal' language and I wouldn't say it really started taking off until around 2005ish.

So 4 years after Google.

Which made my point to the parent.

And apparently everyone's been living under a rock because Python didn't become truly huge until maybe 10 years ago.

When people decided what language to use, it was very much a "X uses this, maybe we should" kind of decision. Still is for the most part.

Zope was a Python project from the late 90s, and had quite a bit of attention and traction in the early cms/publishing days. That brought Python attention, and certainly gave it some mindshare in the late 90s.

Two years later the project had become an integral part of some critical business processes, and IT had to take it on. They decided to rewrite it in C#. I left the company at that point, and almost a decade later I got a call from a former coworker asking for help to fix the system. It turns out it was basically unchanged from when I left, and the address of the Exchange server that it relied on for auth had changed.