Who were the six Stanford students behind Architext?
Excite began as Architext Software, incorporated in June 1993 by six Stanford University students: Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried. They borrowed about $15,000 from their parents and built the thing out of a rented house in Cupertino.
The first product was not a web search engine. Architext sold software that indexed large bodies of text by statistical word relationships, so that a query for "doctor" would also surface documents that said "physician." The public web was barely a year old and nobody was sure it would be the market.
By 1994 it clearly was. Vinod Khosla, then a partner at Kleiner Perkins, arranged a $250,000 first round in January 1995, and Kleiner Perkins became the largest outside shareholder. The product was renamed Excite, and in October 1995 the Architext site relaunched as excite.com.
That investor relationship matters later. Khosla was the same man who, four years on, carried Larry Page and Sergey Brin's offer to sell Google into Excite's boardroom.
How big did Excite get before Google existed?
Excite went public on April 4, 1996, selling 2 million shares at $17 and raising about $34 million. Yahoo and Lycos listed in the same month, which is how April 1996 became the month the search business learned it could sell stock to the public.
The money went into scale rather than into search. Excite absorbed the Magellan and WebCrawler directories, launched free webmail in 1997, and rebuilt its home page into 14 topic channels with a personalization layer called My Excite. By 1997 Excite ranked as the sixth most visited website in the world.
None of that was a search strategy. It was a portal strategy, and every large site ran the same one: keep the visitor on the page, count the page views, sell the banner. Revenue came from attention, not from intent.
That detail explains everything that follows. On the 1998 scoreboard, a search engine that answered fast and sent the reader away was a worse product than one that kept them clicking through horoscopes. Yahoo passed on Google in the same stretch of years, for reasons that rhyme.
What really happened when Google offered itself for $750,000?
In 1999 Page and Brin were Stanford PhD students with a link-ranking system called PageRank, no revenue model and a strong wish to finish their doctorates. Khosla brought their offer to Excite chief executive George Bell: buy Google outright, first for about $1 million, then negotiated down to $750,000.
Bell said no, and the money was not the sticking point. "Larry Page insisted that we have to rip out all of the Excite search technology and replace it with Google," Bell told CNBC in March 2015. Excite at that moment had hundreds of engineers working on its own stack, a board, and quarterly numbers to hit.
Bell's own memory of the price is lower than the figure everyone repeats. On CNBC he put it at $250,000 to $500,000 in cash plus roughly 1 percent of Excite, against the $750,000 that appears in almost every retelling. No term sheet has ever been published, so both numbers stand on recollection.
He has never pretended the call looks good. "I think the decision we made at the time, with what we knew, was a good decision," Bell said in that 2015 interview, before adding that it was laughable to say so now.
Why did the @Home merger take down a $35 billion company?
While the Google offer sat there, Excite was closing a deal nearly 9,000 times bigger. On January 19, 1999, Excite and @Home Network announced an all-stock merger valued at about $6.7 billion, a figure Excite filed with the SEC on Form 8-K. @Home had the cable broadband pipe. Excite had the front page. Both boards had signed.
The market believed it. Excite@Home shares reached $128.34 in the first quarter of 1999, worth roughly $35 billion.
Three things then broke. Broadband subscribers did not use Excite any more than they used another portal, so the promised traffic synergy never appeared. AT&T, which controlled @Home after buying TCI in 1998, began arranging to move cable subscribers off the @Home network as contracts ran out. And the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000, taking the banner-ad market down with it.
Excite@Home lost $7.4 billion in 2000 and filed for Chapter 11 on September 28, 2001. AT&T bought the broadband network out of that bankruptcy and the old network was switched off that December.
Who owned Excite at the end, and who owns it now?
The portal outlived the company that killed it. In the 2001 bankruptcy the excite.com name, trademarks and user data went to iWon and InfoSpace, and iWon folded the site into a group called Interactive Search Holdings.
Ask Jeeves bought that group in 2004. Its Form 8-K of March 4, 2004 lists the assets as "My Way, My Search, My Web Search, iWon, Excite and the MaxOnline advertising network," at an aggregate purchase price of $343 million. IAC bought Ask Jeeves the following year for $1.85 billion, and Excite became an IAC property operated by Ask Media Group.
It stayed that way for two decades: a thin start page with somebody else's search results behind the box and a link rail of weather, horoscopes and games. Excite webmail was retired in 2021. Then IAC decided to leave search altogether. Ask.com closed on May 1, 2026, and excite.com was shut down in August 2026.
The only Excite still trading anywhere is Excite Japan, a separate Tokyo company under Excite Holdings that was never part of the American business.
What is left of the Excite search engine today?
Very little, and the honest answer is that almost nothing of it lasted past 2001. excite.com no longer serves a portal, and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine now holds the only working version of the 1996 home page and the 1997 channel redesign.
The technology went first. Excite's concept-matching search, the statistical trick that started the company in 1993, was retired long before the brand was. Search on excite.com ran on other companies' indexes for its last twenty years.
The founders came out of it fine. Joe Kraus went on to build JotSpot, which Google bought in 2006, and later became a partner at Google Ventures. Graham Spencer also ended up at Google. Six students borrowed $15,000 in 1993 and were millionaires by April 1996. It was the company, not the people, that did not make it out.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Excite still exist?
No. Excite does not still exist. IAC shut excite.com down in August 2026, four months after closing Ask.com on May 1, 2026, which ended the portal that had run since October 1995. A separate company, Excite Japan, still operates in Tokyo under Excite Holdings and has no connection to the American Excite.
Did Excite really turn down buying Google for $750,000?
Yes. In 1999 Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell Google to Excite, with Vinod Khosla acting as go-between, at a price widely reported as $750,000 after starting near $1 million. Excite chief executive George Bell declined, and told CNBC in 2015 that the deal broke on Page's condition that Excite replace its own search technology with Google's.
Who owns Excite.com now?
IAC owns Excite.com, and ran it through its Ask Media Group division until the site was shut down in August 2026. The domain reached IAC by a long chain: iWon and InfoSpace bought it out of the Excite@Home bankruptcy in 2001, Ask Jeeves acquired it in 2004 as part of a $343 million deal for Interactive Search Holdings, and IAC bought Ask Jeeves in 2005 for $1.85 billion.