Excite

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Excite is an Internet portal with a search engine and its own web directory .

It was one of the most famous sites on the Internet and, together with Yahoo and Netscape, was one of the pioneers of the so-called dotcoms of the 1990s. At that time, Excite worked with its own search algorithms and impressed with a very accurate ranking compared to the competition. In the meantime, a meta search engine is working as a search service on excite.com and the sites for different countries are presented as web portals that can be personalized in a variety of ways, although the appearances differ significantly from country to country.

Company history

Excite @ Home corporate building offered for sale

Excite was founded in 1994 as an architext by Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch, Joe Kraus, Graham Spencer and Martin Reinfried (all computer students at Stanford University except Kraus ) with starting capital of 4,000 US dollars. A year later, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Geoff Yang of Institutional Venture Partners funded $ 1.5 million each and the site went online.

On April 4, 1996, excite went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange with 2 million shares (XCIT) at an issue price of US $ 17 per share. In 1996 the company bought the search engines Magellan and WebCrawler . On May 28, 1999 the company merged with the broadband Internet provider @Home Network and was henceforth called Excite @ Home . For $ 780 million, they bought the greeting card company Blue Mountain Arts from Jared Polis .

In the same year Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered their search engine Google for a takeover offer of 1 million US dollars to Excite @ Home, which Excite @ Home rejected.

Due to the dot-com bubble in March 2000, the company lost value and in 2001 ran into financial difficulties. In September 2001, Excite @ Home sold the previously acquired greeting card company Blue Mountains Arts to American Greetings for $ 35 million (less than five percent of the purchase price) .

On October 1, 2001, Excite @ Home filed for bankruptcy in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California . The remaining 1,350 employees were in the following months released .

In March 2004 the company was taken over by Ask.com . Excite is therefore currently owned by IAC Search & Media .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Stupid Business Decisions: Excite Rejects Google's Asking Price .
  2. ^ Ryan McIntyre: Early Excite History . February 1, 2008.
  3. ↑ Dietmar Mueller: Fusion of Excite and @Home perfect. In: ZDnet.de. May 31, 1999, accessed February 18, 2008 .
  4. ^ Hannelore Crolly: Excite @ Home is in agony. Internet company runs out of money - Nasdaq exchange threatens to be expelled. In: Welt online. August 22, 2001. Retrieved February 18, 2008 .
  5. ↑ Excite.com for sale. In: heise online. October 9, 2001, accessed February 18, 2008 .
  6. ^ ZDNet Editors: American Greetings buys Blue Mountain Arts - ZDNet .
  7. ^ Ask Jeeves Acquires Excite Europe - IAC . Archived from the original on April 13, 2014. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved April 11, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / iac.com