That reveals, I think, the actual error in Excite's strategy: not realizing that "internet search" was the real prize deserving all the attention. That mis-prioritization is what led to accepting the merger with @Home just a little before these Google discussions. That's also why they mainly evaluated Google on some static set of then-common queries. That's why they were satisfied with their existing search results – which by my recollection, were for a while the clearly "most relevant" of then-extant options. Their tech stack & team had been quite good, and certainly seemed "good enough" as just one small part of the particular larger game they thought they were playing.
Had Excite accepted Page's requirement, the tech/team switchover might've been rocky, and I suspect at best Excite would've remained relevant in search for only a little while longer. But the same distractions & headwinds that bankrupted Excite@Home by the end of 2001 likely would've felled the company even with the addition of Google's nascent potential. Google's best talent, including Page & Brin, wouldn't have stayed around for long. (And in the actual history of an independent Google, it still raised tens-of-millions in additional venture investment to give them the time/resources to perfect their model – runway that might not have been available inside Excite.)
It was the earlier choice to emphasize the "last mile" cable-internet business and monthly subscription revenues, via the merger with @Home, that sealed Excite's fate. It nudged them away from buying Google, sure, but also put them on a path where even buying Google couldn't have saved them.
In my eyes this was not a mistake on Excite's part and is only being treated that way because Google happened to become successful after the fact.
Excite's key mistake was before any Google negotiations: when Excite demoted search to be just one part of a larger strategy – which apparently involved a lot of distracting politics with cable companies – instead of search being the strategy.
(Of course, as a high-flying public company needing to report results in 1999, 2000, etc, that potential cable-subscriber revenue sharing – recurring revenue from millions of subscribing households! – must've been very tempting for Excite. The scale & margins ultimately possible with keyword-based, pay-per-click ads were still speculative in 1999. Google Adwords only launched in late 2000, using CPM-impressions pricing, and only added pay-per-click keyword bidding in 2002.)
The buyout/merger/etc led to an inaccurate version of their theme jingle in my head too: "I don't wanna grow, I wanna buy a crappy web portal..."
What made Page & Brin Google's best talent?
But seriously, while I can't be sure Page & Brin were necessarily the absolute best of all Google's talent, they seem pretty smart & effective.
They did a lot of the original work, and hired & managed the original team – which at the time of these Excite negotiations, was probably just a dozen or so people. (That is, smaller than the ~100 person Excite search team whose results they at least matched, drawing the acquisition interest for their impressive performance & scaling potential.) Page & Brin both remained deeply involved in Google's successful product efforts for another decade, and Page is still CEO of the successor parent company Alphabet.
Neither Google, nor Excite in the hypothetical alt-timeline where Excite bought Google, would have wanted to lose Page, Brin, or other top talent by the end of 2001 – when Excite@Home hit the rocks in our timeline.
There is a long history of companies crushing the innovation they buy, and it is not necessarily a top-down effect. Page had good reason to make this issue a deal-breaker.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/business-model-fire-insurance...
In short I was making the point that large corporations should deliberately invest in start-ups that directly attack their own current business model. Think of this as a way of stress testing your business model with the benefit that you own a stake if the attacker happens to succeed. Side benefit, those start-ups that fail will have small teams of technically talented people who now know your market, and are now needing an acquire-hire. Pick through and hire the best out of the failed efforts.
The most famous example I can think of is Microsoft heavily investing in Apple when Apple was just about at its low-point.
There are similar areas of business today, transformative, and underfunded because the value is too far in the future for most investors.