Would you believe Google wanted to cash in for $1 million in its early days? True, and what’s also true is that no one was interested in buying it. One company that stepped forth was Excite, and the CEO at the time, George Bell, said he wasn't willing to pay a million dollars for the search engine. He haggled with the search engine’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to bring the price down to $750,000, but he ended up rejecting that offer as well!
It was just months after Google has been set up in 1999 so Bell could be forgiven for rejecting that kind of money for the start up, but the industry must have been blind to the direction things were headed and the potential that this start up really had.
Excite was one of the big boys in the ‘90s, rivaling the likes of Yahoo!, but it gradually slipped into oblivion itself until Ask Jeeves (today Ask.com) swallowed it in 2004. Much to Bell’s chagrin, Ask Jeeves tried to enter into a search engine war with Google over the years, but as the former faded, one of the most recognizable brands on earth today began its rise and domination to the point that some claim it’s ‘God’. As of May 2013, the company had a market capitalization of $268.44 billion.