Excite

» see excite.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

excite was a yahoo competitor with a stanford-undergrad founder story and a business plan that made sense for about two years. at peak it was the sixth-most-visited site on the web, somewhere between yahoo and altavista on the late-90s portal podium. it sold ad space and ran a search engine, with a directory like everyone else.

excite's peak years overlap with my early dial-up era. but the portal i defaulted to in 1998 was yahoo turkey. excite was an english-language us portal that you would land on once or twice from a magazine cover-cd link, then close because there was nothing on it for someone outside the us suburbs. by 2001 i was on google for search and msn for chat, and excite was a logo on a homepage i never set.

the death was not really about the search engine. excite the portal merged with @home, which was a cable-internet company, and the merged entity called itself excite@home. when broadband took longer to arrive than the business plan needed and the dot-com ad market collapsed, the cable side dragged the portal side into chapter 11 with it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

founded in june 1993 as architext by six undergrads from stanford, including joe kraus and graham spencer. they wrote a search engine in c++ that returned results based on word-context similarity rather than just keyword matching. that was novel in 1993. by 1995 the company had a brand name and $1.5 million in vc money, and it had partnered with netscape for the search bar in netscape navigator.

excite did the standard portal stack: webmail, weather, horoscopes, news, stock quotes, message boards, online shopping. the url was excite.com. the catchphrase was "have you excited today?" the dot-com mood was wholly contained in that sentence.

~ the cracks ~

excite did not buy itself. it got bought. in january 1999 @home, a cable-internet provider co-founded by tci and other cable operators, paid $6.7 billion in stock for excite to bundle the portal as the default homepage on cable modems. the logic was that broadband cable users were a captive audience of high-spending early adopters and excite would monetize them through ads.

the logic broke when the dot-com ad market collapsed in 2000-2001. the cable companies that owned @home stopped paying for the bundled portal because they wanted to run their own. broadband itself rolled out slower than expected. excite@home filed for chapter 11 on october 1, 2001. the cable network was unplugged that december, leaving roughly four million broadband customers without service overnight.

~ the funny part ~

in 1999 two stanford grad students named larry page and sergey brin offered excite the search-engine technology that would become google. they wanted $1 million for it. excite ceo george bell turned them down. some accounts say excite asked for the price to be lowered to $750,000 and bell still rejected the deal because google's search results returned too few pages per query, which was bad for ad inventory.

by the time excite@home filed for bankruptcy, google was the search box on every desk that had a computer.

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