How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

The obvious move was to license PageRank to one of the existing players, and indeed, this is what Page and Brin attempted to do. They met with everyone from the Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, to another search pioneer, Infoseek’s Steve Kirsch. No one was interested. The closest they came to making a deal was when Page wrote up an extensive proposal to Excite’s leadership, suggesting they replace Excite’s existing algorithms with his. Doing so, he calculated, would generate an additional $47 million in revenue for the search engine. “With my help,” Page wrote in his proposal, “this technology will give Excite a substantial advantage and will propel it to a market leadership position.”9 All he asked for in exchange was a seemingly reasonable $1.6 million in cash and Excite stock—a nice little payday—and then he and Brin would return to finishing their doctorate work. Excite countered with $750,000, which Page and Brin rejected. The incumbent search players’ failure to scoop up the PageRank technology has become infamous in business lore as one of the great missed opportunities of all time. Larry Page has, on a few occasions, suggested that the search companies were simply myopic. “They were becoming portals. We probably would have licensed it if someone gave us the money. . . . [But] they were not interested in search,” Page has said. “They did have horoscopes, though.”10