Google Tried to Sell Itself for $1 Million — And Was Refused
Zusammenfassung
In early 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell Google to Excite, then one of the largest search engines on the internet, for $1 million. Excite’s CEO George Bell turned them down. Two factors were cited: Bell worried a search engine too good at finding answers would drive users off the portal and reduce advertising time-on-site, and Page insisted Excite rip out its existing search and replace it wholesale with Google’s. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla talked the founders down to $750,000, but Bell rejected that too. Page and Brin kept Google independent. By 2004, Google’s IPO valued the company at roughly $23 billion. Excite filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
The Meeting That Didn’t Happen
Page and Brin had built their search engine at Stanford as a research project called BackRub — a system that ranked pages by the number and quality of links pointing to them (PageRank). They incorporated Google in September 1998, but by early 1999 the project had outgrown two graduate students: it was consuming their time, money, and attention while they were still nominally pursuing PhDs. They decided to try selling it.
Page approached George Bell, Excite’s CEO, with a proposal: Excite would acquire Google for about $1 million. Page’s condition was that Excite would rip out its existing search and replace it with Google’s. Bell tested the search engine, found it produced significantly better results than Excite’s current system — and rejected the deal.
Why Bell Said No
The explanation commonly attributed to Bell was commercially coherent but strategically fatal: portal-era search engines were not trying to find the best answer quickly. They were trying to keep users on the portal as long as possible, clicking through content and seeing advertisements. A search engine that found exactly what users needed in the first result was, paradoxically, bad for the portal business model. The other reported sticking point was Page’s demand that Excite tear out its own search entirely.
Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist connected to Excite, subsequently negotiated with Page and Brin to lower the asking price to $750,000. Bell rejected this offer too.
The Outcome
Page and Brin kept building Google independently. The search-as-utility model they pursued — find the answer fast, let the user leave — proved to be exactly what users wanted and, through targeted advertising, extremely profitable. Google’s 2004 IPO raised $1.67 billion. As of 2024, Alphabet (Google’s parent) has a market capitalization exceeding $2 trillion.
Excite’s parent company, Excite@Home, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001. The company’s domain now redirects to a spam aggregator.