History Search Engines - Excite

Excite – Born in 1993

 Excite was born in February 1993 as a university project called Architext involving six undergraduate students at Stanford seeking to use statistical analysis of word relationships to improve relevancy of searches on the Internet. This school project eventually led to Excite’s commercial release as a crawling search engine at the end of 1995. With solid growth in 1996, Excite purchased WebCrawler and Magellan. Toward the end of the 1990s, Excite partnered with MSN and Netscape providing search services. In 1999, Excite was sold to broadband provider @Home.com (later becoming Excite@Home) as part of a $6.7 billion merger after its traffic started to decline with the release of Google in 1998. With significant debts, Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy in October 2001 and sold its high-speed network to AT&T for $307 million. A month later, InfoSpace made a $10 million bid to buy Excite@Home’s assets including domain names and trademarks from bankruptcy court. Infospace’s offer was accepted and they subsequently powered the Excite web site and sold portal components to iWon. InfoSpace’s Dogpile crawler replaced Excite’s making Dogpile and Excite’s search results the same. Both Excite and Dogpile are also powered by LookSmart’s directory, except that Dogpile includes a number of other InfoSpace directories. Also as part of the deal, InfoSpace acquired rights to WebCrawler. Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) purchased the Excite.com portal in 2004. Now, Excite offers search results through a metasearch tool combining results from pay-per-click and natural search tools.