Graduate students try to sell their search engine BackRub

Steven Levy's Google Book, in the Plex, has a lot of details about Google, one of which says that Larry Page nearly sold Google's predecessor BackRub in 97 for 1.6 million dollars.

BackRub's idea came from a dream of Page, in which he learned a new way to organize Internet information effectively, and then based on this dream, he made a search engine BackRub, at that time he was a graduate student of Stanford for 1996 years.

A year later, Page began to realize that BackRub is a widely used and profitable product. So in January 97, Page began to try to sell BackRub to a portal called Excite in 1.6 million dollars.

In a letter to Vinod Khosla, the Excite major shareholder, Page said BackRub could increase the Excite traffic by 10%, and advertising revenues could reach 47 million dollars a year.

At the same time, he says he can work in Excite for seven months before school begins in the summer. As for the 1.6 million, Page is so arranged: he took 600,000 dollars in cash and 700,000 dollars worth of shares, the other 300,000 dollars to Stanford. As for Brin, Page did not mention it in the letter.

Khosla will bargain, he says 750,000 dollars can be considered. After that, Page again with Khosla and Excite CEO George Bell met, Bell said: BackRub efficient a bit too, customers come, get results, will soon leave. Therefore, he thinks BackRub will be unfavorable to Excite's advertisement business, he wants his search engine, only competitor 80% is good.

And then, Google became like today.