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Scott Hassan: I remember going to this one meeting at Excite, with George Bell, the CEO. He selects Excite and he types “internet,” and then it pops up a page on the Excite side, and pretty much all of the results are in Chinese, and then on the Google side it basically had stuff all about NSCA Mosaic and a bunch of other pretty reasonable things. George Bell, he’s really upset about this, and it was funny, because he got very defensive. He was like, “We don’t want your search engine. We don’t want to make it easy for people to find stuff, because we want people to stay on our site.” It’s crazy, of course, but back then that was definitely the idea: Keep people on your site, don’t let them leave. And I remember driving away afterward, and Larry and I were talking: “Users come to your website? To search? And you don’t want to be the best damn search engine there is? That’s insane! That’s a dead company, right?
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Adam Fisher (Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom))