 On April 1, 1997, Excite acquired WebCrawler from AOL for $12.3 million.WebCrawler received a facelift on June 16, 1997, adding WebCrawler Shortcuts, which suggested alternative links to material related to a search topic.WebCrawler was maintained by Excite as a separate search engine with its own database until 2001, when it started using Excite's own database, effectively putting an end to WebCrawler as an independent search engine.