Introduction:
Originally one of the earliest and most prominent search tools, Excite has now become a minor search player and a shadow of its former self. The search engine first appeared at the end of 1995 and was one of a spate of launches by the new ‘crawler’ based search engines, sending out spiders to record websites and build a searchable index – others from this time were AltaVista, Lycos, WebCrawler and Infoseek.
In 1996 Excite was growing fast and purchased WebCrawler and also Magellan, a smaller but highly regarded search tool. Excite continued to build a strong position within the search market at the end of the 1990’s and established a series of partnerships with MSN and Netscape to provide search services. However, the main Excite site, along with international versions that had been established, tended to follow the portal route that many of the search engines of the time pursued, offering a range of other services as well as search.
Consequently, the impact of Google’s launch in 1998 meant that these established search sites began to lose traffic and Excite was acquired by @Home.com (a broadband service provider) in a $6.7 billion merger in 1999. This failed to halt the slide, however, and by 2001 Excite@Home was facing significant debts, despite being one of the top ISPs in the US. The Excite search index was also falling behind the other main players of the time – Google, FAST, AltaVista and Inktomi.
Eventually filing for bankruptcy in the US, Excite@Home was broken up as part of a takeover of the service by AT&T. The Excite.com portal was eventually purchased by Ask in March 2004 and the European operations were also taken over this year, giving Ask ownership of all the domains and portals in different countries across Europe.
Excite continues to exist as a brand at the moment, with its range of portal services being offered in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria.
Background of the Study
In 1995, Excite was launched as a web portal. The portal offered a wide range of different types of content including:
• News
• Weather
• Web-based Excite.com email
• Stock quotes
• Metasearch engine
• Instant messaging
• Personalized user homepage
The public search engine originated as the Architext project in February of 1993. Six Stanford undergraduates used word relationship statistical analysis to ensure internet searches were more efficient. By the middle of 1993, the project received full funding. The undergraduates then released the search software to webmasters for use on their websites. Eventually, the software was named Excite for Web Servers.
The original Excite was founded in 1994, but the company did not go public for two years . During the 1990s, Excite became the most recognizable internet brand. In 1997, the Excite.com portal was the sixth most visited. By 2000, Excite was in fourth place. A merger occurred between the Home Network broadband provider and Excire, but in 2001 the company declared bankruptcy. The Excite services and portal were acquired by iWon.com and Ask Jeeves. Shortly afterward, the popularity of the portal declined.
Excite was originally created by Martin Renfried, Ben Lutch, Ryan McIntyre, Mark VanHaren, Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer at a garage located in Cupertino, California . These Standford students intended to create software capable of managing the information available through the internet. The students received $80,000 from the International Data Group in July of 1994 for the development of an online service.
The initial backing for the project was arranged by a former student of Stanford, Vinod Khosla. The $250,000 was possible because he was a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm. During the next 10 months, the company received an additional $1.5 million. The formal launch of Excite took place in October of 1995. George Bell was appointed the CEO of Excel in January of 1996. The WebCrawler and Magellan search engines were then purchased by the company.
Excite signed exclusive agreements for distribution with several companies including Apple, Microsoft and Netscape. In 1994, Jim Bellows was hired by Excel at the age of 72 to determine how the content could be presented in a journalistic manner. He began by hiring journalists to write short website reviews. The partnership ended in 1998 because the users skipped the reviews and went right to the content. The original website for Excel was mainly orange but was changed to the current black and yellow.
Excite went public on April 4th of 1996 with two million shares as the initial offering. Yahoo overshadowed Excel by going public at this time. Excite became the exclusive directory and search service for AOL or America Online in November of 1996 in return for selling WebCrawler and a 20 percent Excite share. A 19 percent stake was purchased by Intuit in June of 1997. Intuit is the creator of TurboTax and Quicken. A partnership deal for seven years was finalized.
A comparison shopping agent called Netbot was purchased by Excite on October 16th of 1997. Intuit simultaneously announced the Excite Business & Investing launch. Later in the year, Excite finalized a deal with Ticketmaster for direct ticketing online. A loss was reported on March 31st of 1998 for roughly $30.2 million by Excite. The first-quarter report showed obligations could only be met through December due to this loss.
Content for the Excite portal was derived from more than 100 sources. Excite was also the first to begin providing free email. As rivals, Lycos and Yahoo! followed shortly. According to a press release from November of 1997, approximately 11.8 million people visited the network between September and October. Negotiations with Yahoo! to purchase Excite began in December of 1998 for between $5.5 and $6 billion. On December 19th, George Bell met with Thomas Jermolek.
Excite was purchased by @Home Network on January 19th of 1999. During this time, Excite was the sixth biggest online portal according to traffic . Although it never happened, Microsoft became interested in merging with Excite to form the MSN.com portal. Later that year, Justin Rohlirch wrote that Larry Page and Sergey Brin felt developing Google required too much time away from their studies. They then offered George Bell the company for $1 million but their offer was rejected.
Vinod Khosla was a venture capitalist at Excite and negotiated a deal for $750,000. When the offer negotiated with Larry Page and Sergey Brin was refused, he threw George Bell out of his office. Rohrlich labeled the refusal to purchase what would become a $900 billion company a stupid business decision. George Bell claimed on both CNBC and a 2014 podcast the reason the deal never happened was that Larry Page wanted to use Google search technologies and he did not agree.
Search Engine Timeline
1990– The first search engine is Archie. A year after they invented the world wide web (WWW), the early search engine crawled through an index of downloadable files. However, the limited data made only the listings available, not the content.
1991– Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, created a virtual library to help users find URLs for different websites. The CERN webservers hosted the library at the beginning of the internet.
1993– JumpStation brought a new leap with their linear search, which showed a page’s title and header in the same results. The search engine ranks results in the order they were found.
1994– David Filo and Jerry Yang create Yahoo! Search. The site was the first collection of web pages across the internet. They include man-made descriptions for the URLs. Site owners can add Informational sites for free, but commercial sites have to pay $300/year.
WebCrawler– the same year that Yahoo! Search launched saw the launch of Web Crawler. They created the first search engine to index entire pages—the amount of data required to do the search engine is too slow to use during the day.
1995– Lycos search engine was also launched in 1994. The search engine cataloged over 394,000 documents by August. By January 1995, they had over 1.5 million papers cataloged.
Content of the Problem:
A lot of people were left wondering what happened to Excite.com. The company began as a prominent search tool only to become one of the minor players. In 1995, Excite offered search engines based on crawler technology with spiders used for building a searchable index and recording websites. During this time, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista were also popular. By 1996, Excite was showing excellent growth. By the 1990s, Excite was considered to be in a strong market position.
This was when partnerships were established with Netscape and MSN for the provision of search services. The main Excite site in addition to the international versions provided a variety of services in addition to search. Due to the 1998 launch of Google, established search platforms began losing traffic . The 1999 merger with @home did not stop the downward slide. Even though Excite@Home was a top ISP in the United States, the company was facing significant debts.
Literature Review:
About Excite for Web Servers
Excite for Web Servers brings Excite, Inc.’s second generation media navigation tools to Internet Web Servers turn-key, “plug-and-play” package that offers easy installation and requires no programming. Key features include:
Excite for Web Servers enables users to search for information by concept rather than by key-word. For example, an attorney investigating the latest developments on “intellectual property rights” can retrieve information on software piracy and copyright law even if the relevant documents contain none of the key-words in the query. This means that users can easily find the documents that interest them even if they don’t know the exact key-words necessary to describe their search to a traditional information retrieval system. Excite for Web Servers’s concept-based searching engine is able to determine related concepts from document collections, eliminating the need for an external, manually-defined representation of knowledge (such as a large and un-maintainable thesaurus or “knowledge base”).
Excite for Web Servers offers capabilities that go beyond the scope of traditional information retrieval tools. Most text search companies focus on a very narrow problem: finding information for users who (1) know exactly what they are looking for, and (2) know the right key-words to describe their interest. An example of this kind of situation is a user who would like to locate an analyst report about a particular company in which he’s considering investing. Like first generation text search engines, Excite for Web Servers addresses this need.
At other times, however, this same user may want to “look for interesting investment ideas.” He wants to browse the available information. This is where Excite, Inc. is so different from the earlier tools. Excite, Inc. offers not only the best retrieval tools, but also a suite of interactive browsing tools that can help users navigate unfamiliar collections of information. Browsing features include:
Query-by-Example allows users to say “find more documents like this one” with the click of a button.
Automatic Subject Grouping allows users to view the results of a query grouped by subject. Each group contains documents that are similar to one another.
Automatic Abstracting creates a short summary or abstract of a long document, selecting the important concepts and presenting them in a concise format.
Performance
Index size: Our sophisticated index compression technology yields indexes are typically less than 15% of the size of the documents being indexed. First generation search engines typically require indexes that are 2 to 7 times larger. Our technology permits a great deal more of the index to be in memory, which increases searching speed.
Indexing speed: The Excite, Inc. search engine indexes up to 300MB/hour on a Sparcstation 20 (single processor, 60 MHZ).
Retrieval speed: Concept-based searching takes 1-2 seconds (or less), even on large databases (exclusive of network latency).
Platforms
The Excite, Inc. engine runs on Windows NT and a variety of Unix platforms, including SunOS, Solaris, SGI, HP-UX, AIX, and BSDI. The search engine is designed for easy integration with any Web Server.
Flexibility and Usability
Support for HTML and ASCII documents.
Simple, natural-language user interface. Keyword and boolean searching also supported.