Six Stanford students built Excite's search engine before most people had heard of a web browser. Their software tried to understand what a page was about, so a search could find documents that matched an idea. In April 1996 Excite went public in the same month as Yahoo and Lycos. Search engines were the front door to the young web. Wall Street was betting that whoever owned that door would sell the most ads.

Architext Before Excite

Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried started the project at Stanford. They formed Architext Software in June 1994 to sell tools for searching large sets of documents. The web was growing fast, and in 1995 the company launched Excite as a free search site paid for by advertising. Excite soon added news, horoscopes, chat and free email to keep visitors coming back.

Married to @Home

Excite sold 2,000,000 shares at $17 each in April 1996 and began trading on Nasdaq as XCIT on April 4. The founders became millionaires. Excite bought rivals and grew into one of the largest portals. In 1999 it merged with @Home Network, a cable broadband company, in a deal valued at about $6.7 billion. The combined Excite@Home burned through cash after the dot-com crash and filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

Cover: Fireworks at Hemissem, Wenceslaus Hollar. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for fireworks (excitement, sparks of discovery).