Page ended up working with another grad student (Scott Hassan, who later ended up founding eGroups, which later became Yahoo!Groups), who rewrote the whole thing in Python. Google's crawler and webserver were in Python until the Netscape deal (summer 1999). When Urs was hired as Google's first VP, he started transitioning the system to C and C++ to solve Python's performance problems. Java was introduced when Google hired some very skilled Java programmers during the 2001-2003 recession.
So yes, Urs sorted out Google's Java problems by not using Java.
Another detail I've stumbled on is that Sam Rushing, a talented Python programmer, had something to do with Python in Google's early history: http://www.nightmare.com/~rushing/ .
He also worked at eGroups. He wrote "medusa" which became asyncore in the Python standard library (http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/). This was long before Java had async I/O. Interesting that Guido is working on the new async I/O interface "tulip" in the Python core after all these years!
And Larry Page's brother apparently also worked at eGroups.
Steven Levy's "In the Plex" is probably the best one. A lot of the stuff in my comment is mentioned there, and the rest is cobbled together from various presentations, blog posts, and Quora answers on the net.
"In the plex" and "I'm feeling lucky" - both are very good and offer very different angles. As you can guess by the name first is more formal history whereas second are memoirs of a their marketing guy who has got a very good sense of humour :)
Page ended up working with another grad student (Scott Hassan, who later ended up founding eGroups, which later became Yahoo!Groups), who rewrote the whole thing in Python. Google's crawler and webserver were in Python until the Netscape deal (summer 1999). When Urs was hired as Google's first VP, he started transitioning the system to C and C++ to solve Python's performance problems. Java was introduced when Google hired some very skilled Java programmers during the 2001-2003 recession.
So yes, Urs sorted out Google's Java problems by not using Java.