Ask Shuts Down, Recalling Excite’s Missed Google Deal
Ask, the search engine founded as Ask Jeeves in 1996, has shut down. Ask bought Excite in 2004 for $343 million, after Excite had been acquired by At Home Corp. in 1999 for $6.7 billion to form Excite@Home. Following Excite@Home's bankruptcy, the assets were sold to iWon for $10 million in 2001 before later ending up at Ask.
Excite also turned down a $750,000 offer from Sergey Brin and Larry Page to buy Google in 1999 while they were still finishing their Stanford PhDs. In a 2000 remark cited alongside the shutdown, Page described artificial intelligence as "the ultimate version of Google."
From the sources (3 posts)
@trungtphanAsk just shut down, book-ending one of the great internet what-ifs. It was founded as AskJeeves in 1996 and acquired Excite in 2004 in a $343m deal. In 1999, Excite had turned down offer from Sergey Brin & Larry Page to buy Google for
@jasonlk@TrungTPhan yeah but "Excite was acquired by At Home Corporation in 1999 for $6.7 billion to form Excite@Home. This high-profile merger aimed to combine high-speed internet access with a major search portal. Later, after Excite@Home's bankr
@bearlyaiAsk Jeeves really was the proto-LLM. Larry Page also called the current wave of AI way back in 2000: “Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So, we’d have the ultimate search engine. It would understand everythin