Excite

Excite was one of the big names of the first web boom. In 1997 it was among the most visited sites in the world. It ran search for AOL and Netscape, bought rival search engines and became a portal with news, email and shopping. Then it merged with a cable internet company at the top of the market and was bankrupt within three years.

Its founders were six friends from Stanford. Excite never kept an office in Palo Alto that we could confirm, but its story runs straight through the Stanford network and the venture firms on Sand Hill Road. It also includes one of the most retold what-ifs in local history: the chance to buy Google.

Six friends from Stanford

The company began in June 1993 as Architext, according to Wikipedia, which cites trade press. The founders were six friends who were all Stanford students:

• Graham Spencer
• Joe Kraus
• Mark VanHaren
• Ryan McIntyre
• Ben Lutch
• Martin Reinfried

Accounts say the idea was first discussed over burritos. Wikipedia places the founding in Cupertino, about ten miles south of Palo Alto. The early web had no good way to search the text of millions of pages. Several student teams around the country were racing to build one. Architext was the Stanford entry in that race, about half a year before Yahoo's hand-built directory appeared on the same campus.

Early money from Sand Hill Road

The first revenue came from an odd source. In July 1994 International Data Group, the technology publisher, paid the founders $80,000 to develop an online service.

Real venture money followed in early 1995. Vinod Khosla, a former Stanford student and then a partner at Kleiner Perkins, arranged a first round of $250,000 in January 1995, with $1.5 million provided over ten months. Geoff Yang of Institutional Venture Partners soon added another $1.5 million. Khosla later started his own firm; our Khosla Ventures profile lists Excite among the companies he backed as a Kleiner partner. IVP has its own page in our venture capital section.

The site launched under the Excite name in October 1995. Newspaper editor Jim Bellows was hired to shape its content in a journalistic style.

The boom years

Excite moved fast once it had a product and money. The main steps:

1. January 1996. George Bell joined as chief executive.
2. April 1996. Excite went public on Nasdaq. Yahoo and Lycos listed the same month. Our Yahoo profile tells the story of its Stanford rival.
3. 1996. It bought the Magellan search engine for stock and took over WebCrawler from AOL, becoming AOL's exclusive search provider in a deal that gave AOL a 20 percent stake.
4. June 1997. Intuit, which started in Palo Alto, bought 19 percent of Excite for $40 million. See our Intuit profile.
5. July 1997. Free webmail launched.
6. October 1997. A deal placed Excite inside Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The same month Excite launched in Japan with the trading company Itochu.
7. May 1998. Excite became the search engine on the Netscape home page in a two-year deal worth $70 million.

Like other portals, Excite earned its money from advertising and partnership fees, so traffic was everything. Deals with browsers and online services brought in users who might never have typed its address. That strategy worked while advertisers were paying boom-era prices.

By early 1999 Excite was the sixth largest portal by traffic. Late in 1998 Yahoo reportedly held talks to buy it for $5.5 billion to $6 billion.

The Google offer

The story most people know about Excite involves two other Stanford graduate students. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on BackRub, the research project that became Google. They felt it was taking time away from their studies. As the story is usually told, they offered it to Excite for $1 million. Khosla negotiated them down to $750,000. Bell turned it down anyway.

Bell has given his own reason. He said the deal fell apart because Page wanted Excite to replace its search technology with Google's, which Bell would not accept. The exact figures come from later retellings rather than documents, so treat them as approximate. The broad outline, that Excite passed on Google, is widely reported.

Excite@Home

In January 1999 Excite agreed to merge with @Home Network, a company that sold high-speed cable internet service. The all-stock deal was valued at $6.7 billion. The combined company, Excite@Home, had George Bell as chief executive. AT&T, @Home's largest shareholder, gained voting control.

The merged company was based in Redwood City. Stanford says the land now used for its Stanford Redwood City campus, which opened in March 2019, was once home to Excite@Home, the tape recorder pioneer Ampex and the Mid-Point Technology Park. Our page on Stanford Redwood City covers the campus today.

Excite@Home kept buying. It bought iMall, the photo site Webshots and the e-card company Blue Mountain Arts. None of it saved the company when the dot-com bubble burst. Bell resigned in September 2000 after large losses. In 2001 Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy and sold off its pieces. Webshots went back to its founders for $2.5 million, a small fraction of the $82.5 million Excite had paid in stock.

What happened to the brand

After the bankruptcy the Excite portal passed to iWon and then to Ask Jeeves, which IAC later bought. For two decades Ask Media Group ran Excite.com as a simple portal with search results from outside providers.

In 2026 that ended. According to Quartz, IAC closed its search business, including Ask.com, on May 1, 2026. Wikipedia, citing a September 2026 report, says Excite.com shut down in August 2026. We could not load the site in late October 2026. Excite Japan, which began as a joint venture in 1997, is now run separately by Excite Holdings and is still online.

Excite's place in the local story

Excite shows both sides of the 1990s Stanford startup story. Students with a good idea could raise money from Sand Hill Road within months, go public within three years and sign deals with the biggest names online. The same speed meant a company could grow far beyond its business before anyone tested whether the business worked.

Excite also shows how small the network was. Its first investor was a Stanford alumnus at Kleiner Perkins. Its rivals included Yahoo, started by Stanford students on the same campus. It was offered Google by two more Stanford students. One of its bigger shareholders was Intuit, a company that began in Palo Alto. Few places could produce that many connected companies in so few years. The dot-com era page puts Excite in that wider context.

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