Beaten by Google - Joe Kraus founder of excite

Lessons from Silicon Valley from bbc

"Lesson number one from Excite is about timing in a technology business
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Lesson two says: the internet is a new sort of market place that needs new business plans to make it work.
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Both Excite and Google are free to use; both business plans needed the support of advertisers.
But Excite took the conventional view that the ads would come from the top 100 companies in the USA, the people who buy huge amount of TV time and blanket the newspapers and the magazines.
Google did not go for the big spenders. Google's squads of PhDs wrote algorithms that would make it viable for the company to take hundreds of thousands of ads from hundreds of thousands of small (or big) companies, and pop the ads up in highly relevant spaces close to the search lists. "