Wait, Excite Could Have Bought Google? And They Didn't?

Hey, remember Excite? You know, the search engine? Yeah, neither does anybody else. When we put “Excite” into Google Image Search, the majority of it was either porn or images from the Wii’s “Excite Truck”. We wound up getting the page image off a MySpace page that autoplayed a MIDI version of Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound.” If that’s not a sign of how forgotten you are, we don’t know what is.

But Excite had a chance to be relevant beyond 2001, or at least keep Yahoo! alive by horribly mismanaging some geniuses, when a young search company called Google offered to sell out to them for $1 million. They refused. So Google was negotiated down to $750,000. Again, Excite turned them down, probably excited to put that $750,000 into Pets.com stock or something.

Now Google is worth $179 billion and Excite got bought by AskJeeves. The Internet is a fickle place.

[ via TechCrunch ]