
Excite CEO: Why Excite didn't buy Google (2014) [audio] - wenbin
https://lnns.co/GotE_OcuK8w
======
omarchowdhury
Key points: Excite's CEO passed on purchasing Google for $750K + 1% of
Excite's stock because as a condition of the acquihire deal, Larry Page
demanded Excite's tech stack be replaced with Google's. While the financial
terms of the deal were acceptable to both parties, the deal fell apart due to
Larry's request: Excite tested Google's search results against theirs and at
the time found no material difference warranting such a drastic change in
their business.

~~~
gojomo
And if you listen beyond the highlighted range of the interview, you hear
Excite's CEO Bell speaking of how most of his attention was on the @Home side
of the business, managing difficult relationships with his cable-company
owners/partners.

That reveals, I think, the actual error in Excite's strategy: not realizing
that "internet search" was the real prize deserving _all_ the attention. That
mis-prioritization is what led to accepting the merger with @Home just a
little before these Google discussions. That's also why they mainly evaluated
Google on some static set of then-common queries. That's why they were
satisfied with their existing search results – which by my recollection, were
for a while the clearly "most relevant" of then-extant options. Their tech
stack & team had been quite good, and certainly seemed "good enough" as just
one small part of the particular larger game they _thought_ they were playing.

Had Excite accepted Page's requirement, the tech/team switchover might've been
rocky, and I suspect at best Excite would've remained relevant in search for
only a little while longer. But the same distractions & headwinds that
bankrupted Excite@Home by the end of 2001 likely would've felled the company
even with the addition of Google's nascent potential. Google's best talent,
including Page & Brin, wouldn't have stayed around for long. (And in the
actual history of an independent Google, it still raised tens-of-millions in
additional venture investment to give them the time/resources to perfect their
model – runway that might not have been available inside Excite.)

It was the earlier choice to emphasize the "last mile" cable-internet business
and monthly subscription revenues, via the merger with @Home, that sealed
Excite's fate. It nudged them away from buying Google, sure, but also put them
on a path where even buying Google couldn't have saved them.

~~~
WilliamEdward
You're implying this was a bad decision because they didn't realise the power
of internet search. In reality, had they accepted google's terms they probably
would have tanked before they could even get it off the ground.

In my eyes this was not a mistake on Excite's part and is only being treated
that way because Google happened to become successful after the fact.

~~~
gojomo
As I wrote, I agree that a Google acquisition would not have made a difference
for Excite.

Excite's key mistake was _before_ any Google negotiations: when Excite demoted
search to be just one part of a larger strategy – which apparently involved a
lot of distracting politics with cable companies – instead of search being
_the_ strategy.

(Of course, as a high-flying public company needing to report results in 1999,
2000, etc, that potential cable-subscriber revenue sharing – recurring revenue
from millions of subscribing households! – must've been very tempting for
Excite. The scale & margins ultimately possible with keyword-based, pay-per-
click ads were still speculative in 1999. Google Adwords only launched in late
2000, using CPM-impressions pricing, and only added pay-per-click keyword
bidding in 2002.)

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adim86
I always find stories like this fascinating. It always reminds me of how
fragile our futures are. If Google was acquired the internet will be a VERY
different place today. I find it humourous because this kinda brings to mind
Skynet from the Terminator. In the movies, they spend a lot of time sending
killing machines to the past to take out people who would invent the future
and it causes a great deal of chaos, while all they might need to do is add a
clause in a merger or acquisition that botches a deal that prevents Skynet
from existing and the mission is accomplished. LOL

~~~
Jestar342
Instead of killing machines, the terminators would be lawyers. That could be a
very interesting plot.

"Are you Sarah Connor? ... You've been served."

~~~
Izkata
In _The Sarah Connor Chronicles_ , one Terminator accidentally time traveled
decades too far into the past, its arrival tweaking the timeline such that the
person it was supposed to assassinate wouldn't be at the venue he was supposed
to be. The terminator became a businessman and built a construction company,
just to build the building where the assassination was to take place.
According to records found, it was loved by its workers, since it cared more
about getting the job done than about profits, and would regularly work
alongside them.

So yeah, the idea doesn't need a lot of tweaking for a lawyer terminator to
exist. They already do whatever they need to for their goal, they aren't
_just_ killing machines.

~~~
endtime
I'm sure this was part of the original intention of whoever named them
"Terminators".

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threeseed
People forget that had Google been acquired it's not like we would still have
the same site today.

The main reason it was successful back in the day was because it was fast,
clean and had no ads. Any company that acquired them would sort those out
pretty quick.

~~~
onion2k
I've come around to the idea that the old 'directory style' search engines is
a feature that I'd quite like to see again. If a search engine is _only_
available as a search listing then you're entirely at the mercy of the
algorithm. With a human-curated directory of links there's some checking going
on, and it's _much_ harder for someone to game their way to the top of the
listings.

~~~
simonh
With a pure search system, you can endlessly tweak your results to precisely
what you need in any obscure topic space using search terms.

With a human curated directory, you will instead find that whatever terms you
add, you always get dumped back into the same box of hand built pages of
results. Once you’ve mined those out, this will get really frustrating.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
A blend of the two approaches would be useful. Expose the internal topic
classifications and let searchers manipulate them to narrow or widen the
search space.

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partingshots
Google would 100% have failed without its original founders, Brin and Page,
running the company in its early years.

I’m very glad they weren’t acquired.

~~~
yccheok
Don't forget Eric as well. He is one of the trio, who turns Google into what
it is today.

~~~
vezycash
Eric's contribution to Google was paranoia and urgency from his bitter
experiences losing twice to Microsoft. He knew Microsoft would come after
them. So, they to widen the gap so far that when the "sleeping giant" woke up,
it wouldn't be able to overtake and crush em.

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geophile
Let’s not forget that Bell also decided to spend $780M on an e-greeting card
company.
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestreet.com/amp/story/803...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestreet.com/amp/story/803111/1/excitehome-
buys-blue-mountain-arts-web-site-for-780-million.html)

I mean, if he had flipped a coin on each decision, his expected outcome would
Have been higher.

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sytelus
According to Steven Levy, Excite CEO was visibly upset when Google won better
result in “search backoff”. Now he says he didn’t saw difference. Much better
coverage is here: [http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/11/the-real-
reaso...](http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/11/the-real-reason-
excite-turned-down-buying-google-for-750000-in-1999/)

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paulus_magnus2
There are more interesting questions:

\- what if Excite bought Google and killed it. And kept buying all competitors
before they become a threat .... like Google does these days.

\- following from there: which companies have been bought and killed off so
that the future we could have had was sacrificed on the altar of existing
companies defending their own turf.

\- following even more: Which innovation are we not seeing because the huge
business model desert created by the dominant advertising model (which now
turned into surveillance model).

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dang
Related from 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821236)

2010:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740871)

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nkkollaw
I love it. When you visit Excite, there's a message saying they're redesigning
their site: [http://www.excite.com/](http://www.excite.com/).

When do you ever need to do that, rather than doing the redesign and then
publishing it whenever it's ready..?

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SomewhatLikely
Likely they would have seen differences if they had compared on long tail
queries instead of common queries. With the growth in search usage at the time
the diversity of searches was only going up.

~~~
rasz
Steven Levy:

"they tested was “Internet.” According to Hassan, Excite’s first results were
Chinese web pages where the English word “Internet” stood out among a jumble
of Chinese characters. Then the team typed “Internet” into BackRub. The first
two results delivered pages that told you how to use browsers. It was exactly
the kind of helpful result that would most likely satisfy someone who made the
query. Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite
were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they
sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad
revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired
metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be
counterproductive."

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chirau
A lot of people want to judge investors who passed on Google. They shouldn't.
In VC you hit or miss, you win some you lose some. People judge investors who
passed saying it was a "poor" decision. That's only because you have hindsight
and hindsight is 20/20.

I am sure there were many other search plays at the time and picking from one
was just like picking a crab from a barrel.

I doubt investors, who do this everyday and win some and lose some, worry all
the time about why they passed on Google.

~~~
chrisseaton
I’m not sure what you’re saying - that we shouldn’t assess people whose job it
is to pick investments with how well they pick investments? Isn’t it supposed
to be their skill to be able to pick things without hindsight? Otherwise what
are they doing and why don’t they just gamble the money in a casino instead?

~~~
dabbernaught420
Investors don't work with perfect information. They work with imperfect
information. This means that it is impossible to predict with certainty what
will happen.

So it's important to remember that an investor who passes on a product that
goes on to become very successful may have actually made the best possible
decision _given the information that she had_.

~~~
jdmichal
It's exactly this. You have to judge a decision based on the merits of the
decision, not on the outcome. A great example is poker. I _should_ call an
all-in on a hand I will win 95% of the time. I will still lose one in twenty
times. That does not mean it was a bad decision.

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sct202
If Google had been bought by them, the would have been starved to death for
resources from the messy merger with @Home.

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wenbin
Just curious - when did you start using Google regularly?

For me, it was after the year 2000, two years after Google was incorporated.

~~~
tiborsaas
That's a good question. I remember using Yahoo and AltaVista a lot in high
school. In college I'm 100% sure I used Google all the time which dates back
around 2002/3\. Switched to Gmail in 2005.

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pbreit
With stories like these, I'm not always convinced that the acquirer really had
a viable offer on the table.

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vanesadawson
Nice. Is that happen ?

