Google is not the current generation. In 1998, hardware was not fast enough to make dynamic languages feasible.
Weren't a lot of Web sites written in Perl in 1998? And there was the AOLServer/Tcl crowd, but we won't speak of that.
I'm not sure why that's controversial. Sure, Perl was quite popular in the CGI days, but at scale? I guess Yahoo has been using PHP for a long time. Certainly things like Ruby, and maybe Python, were not really feasible until we had faster hardware.