Yahoo!
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo went public in April 1996 and its stock price rose by 600 percent within two years. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal, putting it in competition with services like Excite, Lycos and America Online. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine, receiving 95 million page views per day which was triple the number compared to rival Excite. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Yahoo began offering free e-mail from October 1997 after the acquisition of RocketMail, which was then renamed to Yahoo! Mail. In 1998, Yahoo! decided to replace AltaVista as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Directory with Inktomi. Yahoo's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999 - that of Geocities for $3.6 billion, and Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion.
Excite
On April 4, 1996, Excite went public with an initial offering of two million shares. Its offering was however overshadowed by its biggest rival, Yahoo!, which also went public at the same time. Excite's six founders became millionaires after the offering. In November 1996, America Online (AOL) agreed to make Excite its exclusive search and directory service, in return of a larger 20 percent share in Excite and sale of WebCrawler. In June 1997, Intuit, maker of Quicken and TurboTax, purchased a 19% stake in Excite and finalized a seven-year partnership deal. On October 16, 1997, Excite purchased Netbot, a comparison shopping agent. At the same time Intuit announced the launch of "Excite Business & Investing". Later that year a deal was finalized with Ticketmaster to provide direct online ticketing. On March 31, 1998, Excite reported a net loss of approximately $30.2 million and according to its first quarter report it had only enough available capital to meet obligations through December. Content from Excite's portal was collated from over 100 different sources. Excite was the first portal to start offering free e-mail, and this step was followed by rivals Yahoo! and Lycos.