Excite
More info
- Creator
- Joe Kraus, Graham Spencer et al.
- Released
- 1993 (as Architext)
- Type
- Search engine, web portal
The Stanford-born portal that passed on buying Google for less than a million dollars.
Six Stanford students started Architext in 1993 and renamed it Excite in 1995. Its search relied on statistical text analysis rather than plain keyword matching, and like Yahoo and Lycos it swelled into a portal with news, email and weather on one page.
In 1999 Excite was offered Google for $750,000 and declined. The same year it merged with broadband provider @Home in a deal worth $6.7 billion instead. Excite@Home went bankrupt in 2001, which turns the Google refusal into one of the industry's most quoted misjudgements.