Excite Category Archive

Excite Goes Meta

Although I still consider Excite a "dead" search engine since it no longer gathers, builds, and makes searchable its own database, the site lives on. Previously just serving results from Overture, new owner InfoSpace has now made it a meta search engine with results from several ad databases (Overture, FindWhat, Sprinks) and from others including AltaVista, Inktomi, LookSmart, and eventually FAST. Unfortunately, it does not identify the source of each hit unless you look very carefully at the link URL. See the Excite description or the InfoSpace press release.

Excite Now Straight Overture

Sometime since Excite closed down on Dec. 17, 2001, the results changed. Now all the results on Excite are just straight Overture paid-positioning results followed by hits from Inktomi after the end of the paid hits. This replaced the Dogpile results that Excite showed initially.

Excite Clusters

At some point earlier this month, Excite started clustering its results by site. There is no way to "ungroup" the results, a feature available from other search engines. It also does not identify which hits have more than one page per site available since all results say "more from this site."