When Excite nearly bought Google | Hacker News Reader

When Excite nearly bought Google

submarinecrm.com

82 pointsilldave59 comments

There's an interview with George Bell on TV that's just fascinating from a historical perspective.[1]

It's pretty amazing that the show host had installed an ad blocker plugin for his browser and was asking about the potential impact on revenues. I usually have low expectations when it comes to technology journalists. Here in Australia a one Marc Fennell, who is 28 years old and hosts technology and gaming programming on TV, called Heartbleed a "virus".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd7VwynZOZI

To me, the most interesting thing about that clip has nothing to do with tech, but with journalism - the show host is actually asking him some kind of tough questions and putting him on the spot instead of just giving him a stage to spew his talking points... I kind of remember when journalism worked that way, but it's jarring to see it in the context of modern "talking point regurgitation machine" journalism where the stories are written by corporate press secretaries and copy-pasted into media.

The UK still has a good selection of sharp, merciless interviewers. My favourite is Jeremy Paxman, he's quite a polarising personality but cuts through bs like paper.

I don't understand why interviews (for journalism purposes) are conducted face to face. A written back and forth, such as in a forum or thread, is much more useful at cutting through the BS rather than having to waste time listening to evasive responses. I guess there may be some value in the facial reactions of the subject, but most of the time, if there was a written transcript, I'd have saved a lot of my time and energy.

Interesting point. Although you'd probably get similar evasive responses, the host saying "Now answer more clearly", and a different (but equally evasive) response. They'd have time to concoct a seemingly informative but ultimately useless response.

This happens in a lot of Reddit AMAs...

I absolutely disagree. It is far, far easier to be evasive by text - especially when you have time to compose a reply. Face to face, real time interviews show you when the interviewee doesn't want to answer a question, when they're bluffing, etc.

There might be some people in the world for whom text reveals more of the interviewee's secrets, and other people that pick up more via face to face interviews.

I'm willing to bet that for most people the latter is more intuitive.

Great find. From the host's reference to Excite's debut "a month ago", this must be from May 1996.

There was a window of time where Excite's in-house search results were noticeably the best, even without having the largest index. I think they had done something, with either inlink-anchor-text on inlink-counts, for the first time.

While the In The Plex anecdote makes Excite CEO Bell seem foolish, compared to the CNBC hosts Bell had a brilliant understanding of the opportunity. (And that's not to insult the CNBC hosts, either: they were just channeling the thoughts of their skeptical viewers.)

Well if they knew what they were talking about they wouldn't be journalists

The host was Mark Haines, a long time host of Squawk Box, a daily morning business program on CNBC following the stock market. He passed away recently. He had a no-nonsense interviewing style that would make many CEOs, used to softball questions, uncomfortable - was fun to watch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Haines

Not the typical HN material, but Cenk Uygur was on Joe Rogan's podcast recently [1] giving some interesting insight into the dumbing down of TV journalism and the history / decisions behind his online focus with The Young Turks.

1: http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/cenk-uygur

It's incredible to hear stories where businesses will self immolate just to protect a cherished cash cow. Microsoft's reluctance to make many of their products free online can be seen as a special case of this. And game theory wise Google was quite sharp to start offering under-featured products such as Google docs for free online. Despite the fact that these products had only a fraction of the features of e.g. Word, they were a direct attack on Microsoft's cherished cash cow (Office), and put Microsoft in the incredibly uncomfortable position of either having to begin innovating and offering their products online at deeply discounted prices (and hurting themselves further), or just sitting still while Google's initially awful offerings became more feature rich and a more threatening competitor.

In business inertia is often death.

Office is available for free online, and has been for 4 years now (it was released to the public in June 2010). It's integrated into Sky/OneDrive and available for anyone to use for reading and editing documents.

That'd be Office Online, the document collaboration environment, not the full-featured executables.

I love reading anecdotes like this. I think my favorite is when Woz offered to sell HP the first Apple and the execs laughed him out of the room saying "who is ever going to want a home PC?".

Not surprising though that they thought this.

When I worked computer sales in retail in 1995, I would frequently have people come up and ask me during a sale or some such nonsense: "What would I use this thing for?" Usually it went a little like this:

* Do you write letters or papers?

* Kids who write papers?

* Interested in looking on the internet? No?

* Have a college kid who is on the internet? (do you know what email is?) No?

* Play games? (fairly rare) No?

* Keep track of finances? Don't want to do that?

At this point I just kind of shrugged my shoulders. Outside of some attempts to explain that computers were something good to learn about (in particular for kids), it was a pretty hard sell.

Probably over 50% of the time they asked that question - "What is this thing good for?", I knew where we would end up.

this is pretty much how my conversations go when I tell people that I want to buy a 3d printer.

That's precisely what makes me so excited about them (and physical computing in general). The next Jobs/Woz team is working on that stuff right now and it seems as weird to the layperson as PCs did back when the Berkley Homebrew Club was doing its thing.

I could probably build a 3D printer from scratch, controller, actuators, and all, and I still ask myself the "What is this thing good for?" question.

Okay, sarcasm aside, it looks like these things are finally starting to slowly crack the door open on the realm of real-world usability. This realization dawned on me when I figured that some parts of the quadcopter I've been toiling over in recent days, might as well be 3D printed: the battery holder, maybe the motor mounts, etc. Gimbal parts would be pretty easy too.

And it dawned on me again yesterday, during SpaceX's dog and pony show for the Dragon 2, when they showed the 3D printed rocket engines.

before the internet computers were pretty much useless, except for things like visicalc and wordstar. Besides basic office duties they were useless in the home, except to geeks who didn't mind pecking out simple programs that were forgotten when the machine powered down (or often before!)

Then the models got speeds beyond 2400 baud and netcom and such sprang up and suddenly in the home computers did a little more. There was gopher and nntp and email and you could poke around in the shell accounts for hours of fun. Finally mosaic became nutscrape and the web exploded and suddenly everyone and everything had a "home page". Things looked touch and go for a while as AOL tried to ruin it, but they went poof with their time warner friends around the turn of the century and couldn't (like many companies, including excite) figure out if they were a media or tech company. Thankfully around that time windows was getting a proper tcpip stack and we didn't need to be nerds and figure out winsock settings anymore. Then, and not really until then, were computers viable for regular people at home (no excite pun intended.) there was games (ms flight sim for example) and proper word processing packages, even quark express for "DTP" and there was an embryonic web, bbs, the well, aol, yahoo, pointcast...

Douglas Adams would have enjoyed that story. Success and the wonder of hindsight needs naysayers to dismiss things, whether it is those great authors and their rejection letters or something like this.

The thinking - 'it is too good' - actually persists with dating websites where hooking someone up with someone is a nightmare - it means no more subscription revenue. Maybe it is time for Google to do a dating website with some 'don't be evil' thinking behind it.

Google's early success was probably due to a) having a better product and b) word of mouth. I certainly remember sharing the tip with colleagues in the days before they had the text-only adverts. If I remember correctly they did not know how to monetize it then. But again, they might have known all along but pretended otherwise for the purposes of the legend.

Was anyone else surprised that Google would try to sell for only $1.6 million when they were apparently already large enough to have employees at the beginning of the dotcom boom? That number seems way too low.

I remember when Excite reviewed my website back in 1997. I thought I had won the Internet :) IIRC, they gave me 2.5 whatever their icon was called, excites?

Dear Submarine,

Your mobile page blows on iOS. You and all the sites like you need to stop hijacking the bottom touch event preventing me from bringing up the interface to press back. As far as I am concerned, this action is the new pop-up window or the web because it forces me to perform a different action than I expect to go back.

On the flip side (and I haven't used this site on iOS, so can't weigh in) the fact that Apple decided to turn over 50px of usable space at the bottom of the page to their UI and effectively make it unusable for touch events is really, utterly infuriating.

Hold on, you have to think about the users, not just of your site, but all the sites out there. It's utterly infuriating as a user to have your UI hijacked, by which I mean actions which are normally consistent across the system stopping working. And it's utterly certain that if UI can be hijacked some people will do so.

Maybe there is some perfect-world solution where, if something totally wonderful can happen if the UI would get out of the way, and the user is happy with it, it could be made to happen. But in practical terms when dealing with the Web as the messy place it is, the only realistic way to limit the damage web designers can wreak, is to strictly limit the capacity to override system interfaces.

What's a bottom touch event?

Noted, thanks for the headsup - I'll look into that and fix it. I've not spent much time yet making it responsive, so haven't done much iOS testing, but I will.

Thanks, really. I know it's HN and I'm not trying to pick on you, but it's seriously starting to drive me insane. I can't remember where else I saw it, but in the last week I think I've ran into this several times (I think Salon or TNW or somebody else started doing it too). It makes me think my phone is broken or something.

In any case, it was a great article.

How many of you would have done the same if Twitter was pitched to you? I'm sure I would have, since even after a year it was around I could not understand why in the world would somebody be interested in "following" people and see what they're doing all the time. Every time there was another story on Techcrunch about Twitter, I thought to myself, they must be getting paid to push this over and over. It is only know I see how big an impact it has on our lives. Sometimes it is easy to miss the obvious.

The execs didn't miss the obvious. The excite CEO and others acknowledged that the Google's algorithm is much better. They were worried that its so good that people won't stay on their portals. They just could not figure out how to monetize it so they passed.

This is why Google's IPO was headlined with the statement "Focus on the user and all else will follow."

I love reading little stories and tidbits about executive-level coulda-woulda-shoulda moments.

It is interesting on things like this plays out. If the executive bought it and it tanked, the exec would be blamed for make such a bad decision. However, if the acquisition became 100x, the exec would be hailed as a visionary and a hero.

There needs to be an Executive Stories of Note...(after Letters of Note)

Adapt or die

I guess putting technology in the hands of the non-visionary executive with a strong business sense is basically asking for your [tech] company to die. You need engineers or at least visionary product people in management positions making these kinds of decisions. While it would have been sad if excite had bought Google, it would never happen because they didn't have the vision. And if they did get the vision, Google probably could have continued to become a semi-success in that environment (although probably nothing like what it is today).

According to In The Plex, that deal was actually very close to going through up until that moment. Excite's VCs pushed to get the new CEO on board at some point during the negotiations with Google (and up until that point, Excite's engineer-led founding team had the most control). Strange to think how different things might be if that deal had gone through.

If Excite killed Google, it is likely someone else (perhaps even Googlers who hadn't been hired yet in the hypothetical world) would build Google instead.

Is it a coincidence I never heard of "Excite"? Probably not.

It's an internet company in the same vein as Yahoo and AOL (a hub for news, weather, etc). It peaked in popularity around the late 90s, early 00s. I almost said that it has since shut down but I just checked and, surprisingly, it's still up today: http://msxml.excite.com/

The normal URL is more indicative of what it was like:

http://excite.com/

It's like Yahoo! on steroids...

Noscript advice from that site:

"Tried everything and still can't sign in? It could be due to one of these issues: Your computer's clock may be set ahead 10 years or more."

Mmm, sort of.

Wow it still looks like it did, essentially, a decade ago.

It's pretty amazing that it's almost the same look that was the final iteration before the bankruptcy.

Its so ugly. I hate that shade of yellow in their colour scheme

I think it's about time Merrill Chapman penned a new and updated edition of "In Search of Stupidity" geared towards internet tech firm calamities and stuff like this.

Is there a single example of some company buying another for a few million and the core of the acquisition (people or product) going on to being legitimately worth 100s of millions or billions?

A better headline might be "Excite never even close to buying Backrub".

Moral of the story: Don't let your current business model cloud your judgement. When evaluating something new and foreign, use first principles to see how this will impact the future state of the world.

I remember back when it was so easy to "game" Excite and get your site to rank really well. The site certainly sent a lot of traffic back then...

I remember my version of @home's ad fondly after buying Excite:

"I don't wanna grow, I wanna buy a crappy portal! (let's grow!)"

This is the story I think of when I hear about Google founders described as if they've always had this "Vision."

I think it's safe to say that Google never would have been the success that it is today, if they would have bought them.

They just would have degraded it to something like Altavista with tons of links and banners on the main page.

Yes, I agree mainly because you need a lot of freedom to follow the original Google path (gmail? adwords? google reader? pay per click?) and Google was a gamechanger.

I imagine the new CEO saying that you need to put banners, pay per impressions, don't try to reinvent the wheel with gmail, etc.

Excite already had a web mail product too.

It's what I had before gmail.

But not like gmail. Remember that gmail was a gamechanger too: AJAX + Threaded Inbox including your sent e-mails.

No one I knew cared about the ajax or the threaded inbox (sometimes considered anti-features). It was all about the gigabyte free space, with labels over folders a distant second.

Yes, you are right about the storage (now I can recall the feeling). But the main point remains valid: Google was a gamechanger.

Here's George Bell on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebell

Reply on news.ycombinator.com