Great find. From the host's reference to Excite's debut "a month ago", this must be from May 1996.
There was a window of time where Excite's in-house search results were noticeably the best, even without having the largest index. I think they had done something, with either inlink-anchor-text on inlink-counts, for the first time.
While the In The Plex anecdote makes Excite CEO Bell seem foolish, compared to the CNBC hosts Bell had a brilliant understanding of the opportunity. (And that's not to insult the CNBC hosts, either: they were just channeling the thoughts of their skeptical viewers.)
Comments
Great find. From the host's reference to Excite's debut "a month ago", this must be from May 1996.
There was a window of time where Excite's in-house search results were noticeably the best, even without having the largest index. I think they had done something, with either inlink-anchor-text on inlink-counts, for the first time.
While the In The Plex anecdote makes Excite CEO Bell seem foolish, compared to the CNBC hosts Bell had a brilliant understanding of the opportunity. (And that's not to insult the CNBC hosts, either: they were just channeling the thoughts of their skeptical viewers.)