When Google Wanted To Sell To Excite For Under $1 Million — And They Passed

Stories like this always annoy me, because they seem to imply that Google had some special intrinsic value at the time that was worth more than $1m. The Google that we've all been using for the last decade did not exist when this went down, and there's a possibility that the Google that Excite turned down really wasn't worth $1m at the time. The fact that it went on to grow (ie change) over the next decade into a $165b company doesn't imply anything about its worth in 1999.

EDIT: Although, I bet that scooping up the founders would have made it worth it, though their willingness to sell for $750k makes me wonder if they were the visionaries then that they appear to be now.

Who cares? Google 1999 was not what Google 2010 is. Google 1999 was a slight improvement (yet to be seen) on what Excite had built search engine-wise but not what Excite was portal-wise. Look at their history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

You can see this occurred before the $25m round of financing which Kleiner Perkins was a part of. So at the time it was a money losing PC-Magazine declared "search engine of choice" operating out of a garage competing in a space with Excite, Yahoo, Altavista, and many others. Google was not a business, really, until October 2000 with the launch of the incredibly successful adwords. Prior to that search was a money losing venture.

Even if they did sell, there's a chance that they wouldn't be as successful as today. Perhaps them NOT being locked down by some control-freak VC firm is what lead to increased success ?

Back then, if I'm not mistaken, VC firms (like the one in the story) were much more "controlling" than they are today. So, in my opinion I don't think that Google would have been as successful as they are today.

It would have been funny for the Google guys to send George Bell a really nice bottle of wine on the Google IPO date with a note that said "Thanks George...we couldn't have done it without you."

Or would this have just been mean?

What's also interesting to think of is all the other potential multi-billion dollar businesses that do not exist today because of early acquisitions? Delicious? We sold Auctomatic at a time when building on the ebay platform and ecommerce generally was seen as 'dirty' (this was 2007-2008), I often wonder what we could have made of it if we'd stuck with it.

An example of Excite's bad business judgment that matches its bad search ranking algorithms of the time.

After edit: not knowing what has motivated the downvotes, I'll note for the record that I was an active researcher on the Web at the time, and right from the beginning it was noticeable that Google returned much better search results than Excite did. Excite had some rules about ranking search results that actively penalized pages with relevant content compiled by page authors who weren't spamming. And despite efforts not to be subject to spamming (Excite was not the worst available choice at the time, and was once one of my top-three search engines), Excite could be fooled by spammers. As soon as Google came on the scene, a lot of serious researchers rapidly abandoned Excite, and Excite certainly suffered from a precipitous drop-off in favorable word of mouth from general consumers once Google was on the scene.

I want to know why Google wanted to sell to Excite.

What would be really interesting would be to know why they wanted to sell. Did they not see much future in it? Were they simply tired of working on it, after several years in grad school?

Thank goodness they didn't sell. Their rejection narrowly avoided them becoming another "dipshit" company and forced them to build something great.

nice example of how luck is a factor in business success