Excite

UK Search Engines - Excite

Excite was originally a project known as Architext, created by a team made up of 5 hackers and one political science major - Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch, Joe Kraus, Graham Spencer and Martin Reinfried.

Excite was invested in by venture capitalists, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers and Institutional Venture Partners, who purchased a $4000 hard drive in December 1994 and in October 1995, Architext launced Excite and agreements were met with Microsoft Network and Netscape. The company then officially change its name to Excite and went public after with the primary offer of 2 million shares at $17 per share.

Excite went online in December 1995 with little success. This changed however with the acquisition of Magellan and later on WebCrawler, giving Excite a boost in their market. Excite also offer an in-house Directory service. Eventually in 1997 Excite bought out Webcrawler, resulting in AOL using Excite to power its Netfind.

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