[willheim]

Who cares? Google 1999 was not what Google 2010 is. Google 1999 was a slight improvement (yet to be seen) on what Excite had built search engine-wise but not what Excite was portal-wise. Look at their history: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

You can see this occurred before the $25m round of financing which Kleiner Perkins was a part of. So at the time it was a money losing PC-Magazine declared "search engine of choice" operating out of a garage competing in a space with Excite, Yahoo, Altavista, and many others. Google was not a business, really, until October 2000 with the launch of the incredibly successful adwords. Prior to that search was a money losing venture.

[redstripe]

They may not have had revenue in 1999 but they were by far the best search engine. Prior to discovering them I was using altavista, lycos, and when really frustrated, a random 3rd search engine. I quickly switched to exclusive google use within a very short time of finding the service. This was a company to be excited about because they were miles ahead of the entrenched competition.

If excite didn't see value in them it's because they were too busy pushing their portal garbage (along with everyone else).