Excite started in June 1993 as Architext, a search project by six Stanford students working out of Cupertino, and launched as Excite in October 1995. It went public the next spring and grew into one of the big early-web portals, with horoscopes, stock quotes and TV listings wrapped around the search box. In January 1999 it merged with @Home Network in a $6.7 billion stock deal, and Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Around the same time, Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered Excite the search engine that became Google, eventually for $750,000. Excite passed.
