Excite's portal and services were acquired by iWon and then by Ask Jeeves, but the website went into a steep decline in popularity afterwards.

Excite originally started as Architext in June 1993 in Cupertino, California,[1] created by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark VanHaren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried, who were all students at Stanford University.

In January 1995, Vinod Khosla, a former Stanford student and partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, arranged a US$250,000 "first round" backing for the project, with US$1.5 million provided over a ten-month period.

Soon thereafter, Geoff Yang, of Institutional Venture Partners, introduced an additional US$1.5 million in financing and Excite was formally launched in October 1995.

Excite also purchased two search engines (Magellan and WebCrawler) and signed exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, in addition to other companies.

[6] In June 1997, Intuit, maker of Quicken and TurboTax, purchased a 19% stake in Excite and finalised a seven-year partnership deal.

[9][10] A November 1997 press release showed that there were about 11.8 million unique visitors to the Excite "network" during a 28-day period from September to October.

[11] Around this time, Excite was monetized with online advertising that corresponded to the number of "eyeballs" that visited the portal.

[14] According to Steven Levy in his book In The Plex,[15] in early 1997 two graduate students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided that BackRub, the name of their research project that later became the search engine Google, was taking up time they should have been using to study.

"[21] Following the merger, the Excite division purchased iMall, as well as online greeting card company, Blue Mountain Arts.

Excite furthermore paid for sponsorship of Infiniti Indy car driver Eddie Cheever, Jr., through the 2000 and 2001 racing seasons.

This triggered a demand from Promethean Capital Management and Angelo Gordon & Co for the immediate repayment of $50 million in debt.

On September 13, 2001, Excite@Home sold Blue Mountain Arts to American Greetings for less than 5% of what it had paid less than two years earlier.

As part of the agreement, @Home's national high-speed fiber network access would be sold back to AT&T Corporation.

Despite the financial problems, the Excite network of sites continued to draw many visitors in the U.S., albeit behind AOL Time Warner, Microsoft and Yahoo!

iWon eventually made a joint bid with Seattle's InfoSpace to purchase the domain name and brand.

On November 28, 2001, the court accepted the bid and gave iWon less than three weeks to launch a new Excite portal.

InfoSpace, for its part, owned and operated the web search function on Excite, with Excite's own database now depreciated and instead using Overture and Inktomi search results, along with DMOZ (Open Directory) for the directory and Dogpile metasearch for news results.

Ask Jeeves management became distracted, according to the East Bay Business Times, first by a search feature arms race with Google and Yahoo!, and then by its merger with Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp, announced in March 2005.

Regarding the acquisition, Ask Jeeves CEO, Steve Berkowitz, said, "We look forward to working with InfoSpace to enhance the search experience on Excite, now that our interests are aligned."