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.
EGroups
The service was started by Scott Hassan in 1997 as an email list archiving service called FindMail (mimicking the name "FindLaw", a company co-founded by Martin Roscheisen). Carl V. Page, Jr. joined the company in May 1997. When Martin Roscheisen joined as CEO in March 1998, FindMail was incorporated (in June 1998) and shifted its focus towards hosting email groups. FindMail, then renamed "eGroups", quickly grew to 250,000 users before taking a venture finance round of $810,000 from Atlas Venture in May 1998. In October 1998, with 1.2 million users (growing at 12,000 users per day), Excite offered to acquire the company for $40m but the company decided instead to take $5.1 million more investment money from Sequoia Capital. 
In Sept 1999, eGroups started work on an initial public offering but instead merged with ONElist, with 13 million users exchanging more than 1.3 billion email messages each month. In January 2000, the company raised a further $42 million and filed a S1 with the SEC on March 23, 2000.