Excite (web portal)
Excite is an American website (historically a web portal) operated by IAC that provides outsourced internet content such as a metasearch engine, with outsourced weather and news content on the main page. As of 2024, all of Excite's operations are controlled by services outside of the business.
Type of site
Metasearch engine with outsourced Portal components
BlueTie (webmail operations)
United States
Japan (brand only, through Itochu)
Mixed
None
October 1995
Active but not updated since 2021 (As of 2024, all of Excite's operations are controlled by services outside of the business.)
In the United States, the main Excite homepage had historically a personal start page and web portal called My Excite. Excite once operated a webmail service commonly known as Excite Mail until August 31, 2021, when it would be renamed BlueTie and given a paid business model rather than the free model of Excite Mail.
The original Excite company was founded in 1994 and went public two years later. Excite was once a popular site on the Internet during the 1990s, with the main portal site Excite.com being the sixth most visited website in 1997. The company merged with broadband provider @Home Network but together went bankrupt in 2001. Excite's portal and services were acquired by iWon and then by Ask Jeeves, but the website went into a steep decline in popularity afterwards.
Other services[edit]
FreeLane by Excite[edit]
In a bid to compete against Internet Service Providers like NetZero and Juno Online, which offered free or low-cost dial-up access in the United States, Excite started offering its own "no-pay" service for private customers by partnering with 1stUp.com to create FreeLane by Excite: 1stUp would allow Excite customers to download software in order for them to be able to log-on to the Internet. The software would then rotate a series of sponsored banner advertisements on the user's computer while they surfed the Internet. 1stUp.com soon went out of business, and Excite switched to another partner named WorldShare, rebranding FreeLane as FreeLane version 2.0. As of March 1, 2001, FreeLane was discontinued.[32]
Ticketsmate[edit]
Ticketsmate, in partnership with Excite, sells tickets to customers in the United States.[33] The portal is essentially a ticket selling website where users can buy tickets and search through thousands of events and venues. The powerful search engine capabilities of the Excite server are used on this website to help the user search for tickets and events.
Excite Education (HigherEdu.com)[edit]
Excite also has an education portal called HigherEdu.com that can be used by people to search for and apply for different degrees and online courses. The portal was originally called Excite Education[34] and it once featured a list of thousands of educational institutes across America for prospective students to browse through and apply at but now features a much smaller list. The popularity of HigherEdu.com has declined along with the main Excite portal.
