One of the Most Famous Deals That Never Happened

A once-popular company had the chance to buy Google for a low, low price

It’s one of the most famous deals that never happened. In 1999, Google’s founders were willing to sell to Excite.com, the number two search engine at the time behind Yahoo!, for under $1 million, but Excite turned them down.

Excite was one of the internet’s first true search engines, whereas Yahoo! and many of the other sites acted as portals or directories. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google (which at the time was known as BackRub), approached Excite CEO George Bell with a deal to buy their new company for $1 million. Bell turned down the famous offer.

Excite had previously bought two other search engines, Webcrawler and Magellan, so this wasn’t something new for Excite. But Bell had a second chance to buy Google when Page and Brin were talked down to the price of $750,000 by Vinod Khosla, a backer for Excite. Bell turned them down again. What’s Google’s market value now? Around $1.5 trillion.

There’s no telling what Google would be like today if the sale had taken place, and Bell didn’t have a crystal ball or could have known what they would become. Excite, on the other hand, didn’t fare as well. In 2004, Excite was sold to Ask Jeeves, the search…