What was the Excite search portal originally called?

The Excite search portal was originally called Architext. Six Stanford University students—Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark VanHaren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch, and Martin Reinfried—founded the company as Architext in June 1993 in Cupertino, California.

The name changed as the project developed into a public web search service. Excite launched in October 1995, during the rapid expansion of early internet search and web directories. Its founders initially focused on organizing and searching the growing amount of information online, a purpose reflected in the name Architext.

Excite later became a major web portal. It acquired the Magellan search engine in 1996 and WebCrawler in 1996, and it secured prominent distribution deals, including an arrangement with AOL and a later default-search partnership with Netscape. These acquisitions and partnerships helped it compete with Yahoo!, Lycos, and other early search services.

A common mix-up is confusing Architext with Magellan: Magellan was a separate search engine that Excite acquired, not Excite’s original name. Excite also famously declined an opportunity to acquire Google’s search technology in 1999.