In June 1997, Intuit, maker of Quicken and Turbo Tax, purchased a 19% stake in Excite and finalized a seven-year partnership deal.On October 16, 1997, Excite purchased Netbot, a comparison shopping agent.
Excite also acquired photo sharing company Webshots.
Excite furthermore paid for sponsorship of Infiniti Indy car driver Eddie Cheever, Jr., through the 20 racing seasons.
Excite was one of the most recognized brands on the Internet that decade, with the main portal site being the sixth most visited website in 1997 and fourth by 2000. In July 1994, International Data Group paid them US$80,000 to develop an online service.
The company merged with broadband provider @Home Network but together went bankrupt in 2001. In January 1995, Vinod Khosla (a former Stanford student), a partner at the 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.
He paid good journalists to write brief reviews of web sites.
However, users wanted to get directly to the content and skipped the reviews, so the partnership with Bellows ended in 1998.
On April 4, 1996, Excite went public with an initial offering of two million shares.
Its offering was however overshadowed by its biggest rival, Yahoo! Excite's six founders became millionaires after the offering.
In a 2014 podcast and later again to CNBC, then-CEO of Excite, George Bell, said that the deal fell apart because Larry Page wanted Excite's search technologies to be replaced by Google's, to which Bell did not agree on.
The US.7 billion merger of Excite and @Home Network in 1999 became one of the largest mergers of two Internet companies at the time.
On March 31, 1998, Excite reported a net loss of approximately .2 million and according to its first quarter report it had only enough available capital to meet obligations through December. was in negotiations to purchase Excite for .5 billion to billion.