One thing to consider when reading these kinds of books is that sponsors pay to have their products listed. Yahoo was big on doing this. Excite was known to do this a lot.
> In January 1996, George Bell joined Excite as its chief executive officer (CEO). Excite also purchased two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to other companies. Jim Bellows, then 72, was hired by Excite in 1994 to figure out how to present the content in a journalistic manner.[4] He paid good journalists to write brief reviews of web sites
> In January 1996, George Bell joined Excite as its chief executive officer (CEO). Excite also purchased two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to other companies. Jim Bellows, then 72, was hired by Excite in 1994 to figure out how to present the content in a journalistic manner.[4] He paid good journalists to write brief reviews of web sites
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite_(web_portal)