Excite.com is a collection of web sites and services, launched in December 1995. Excite is an online service offering a variety of content, including an Internet portal showing news and weather etc. (outside USA only), asearch engine, a web-based email, instant messaging, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The content is collated from over 100 different sources.
Excite’s portal and services are owned by Excite Networks, but in the USA, Excite is a personal portal, called My Excite, which is operated by Mindspark; owned by IAC Search and Media.
According to Justin Rohrlich, writing for Minyanville.com, later in 1999, two graduate students at Stanford University, Sergey Brinand Larry Page, decided that Google, the search engine they had developed, was taking up time they should have been using to study. They went to Bell and offered it to him for $1 million, but Bell rejected the offer, and later threw Vinod Khosla, one of Excite’s venture capitalists, out of his office after he had negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. Excite’s refusal to buy what became a $180 billion company by 2010 was labeled by Rohrlich a “stupid business decision”.
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