Magellan (search engine)

Excite

Excite UK homepage (28 May 2012)
Type of site	Portal, Search engine, E-mail
Area served	Worldwide
Owner	Excite: The Excite Networks My Excite USA: IAC
Website	Portal: see below Search engine: msxml.excite.com E-mail: user.excite.co.uk/access/user (UK)
Commercial	Mixed
Registration	Optional
Launched	December 1995; 21 years ago (1995-12)
Current status	Active

Excite (stylized as excite) is a collection of web sites and services, launched in December 1995. Excite is an online service offering a variety of content, including an Internet portal showing news and weather etc. (outside United States only), a metasearch engine, a web-based email, instant messaging, stock quotes, and a customizable user homepage. The content is collated from over 100 different sources.

Excite's portal and services are owned by Excite Networks, but in the United States, Excite is a personal portal, called My Excite, which is operated by Mindspark and owned by IAC Search and Media.

In the 1990s, Excite was one of the most recognized brands on the Internet, before its decline in the early 2000s.

Excite was founded as Architext in 1994 by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark VanHaren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried, who were all students at Stanford University. In July 1994, International Data Group paid them US$80,000 to develop an online service. In January 1995, Vinod Khosla (a former Stanford student), a partner at the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, arranged a US$250,000 "first round" backing for the project, with US$1.5 million provided over a ten-month period. Soon thereafter, Geoff Yang, of Institutional Venture Partners, introduced an additional US$1.5 million in financing and Excite was formally launched in December 1995. 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. In 1994, Excite hired Jim Bellows, then 72, to figure out how to present the content in a journalistic manner. He paid good journalists to write brief reviews of web sites. However, users wanted to get directly to the content and skipped the reviews, so the partnership with Bellows ended in 1998.