Google was not the obvious search winner.
By the late 1990s, search already had Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, and HotBot. Google began at Stanford as BackRub, named for how it analyzed the web’s back-links. In 1999 Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered it to Excite for under $1 million and were turned down. The search engine Excite would not buy is now worth more than $4 trillion.
Google on Brandseum