Sep 30, 2010 13:36 GMT  ·  By

A story shared by Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference shows how different things could have been for the web and how much difference can one small startup make.

He said that Excite, a company backed by his venture fund, was once in the position to buy Google, then a young startup, for less than $1 million.

Google, apparently, was willing to sell, but Excite got cold feet in the end and passed.

Of course, Google is now one of the biggest companies on the planet and one of the most important online. Its brand is as recognized as Coca-Cola in most parts of the world.

The story goes that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were asking for $1 million for the brand-new search engine. This was back in early 1999.

Google recently celebrated its 12th birthday. The company filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998, so Google was just a few months old at the time.

Excite CEO at the time George Bell rejected the offer as he was unwilling to pay that much for the search engine.

Khosla says that he got the two Google cofounders to lower their expectations and managed to convince them to sell for $750,000. However, Excite rejected that offer as well.

Excite was later acquired by Ask Jeeves, the site that would eventually become Ask.com, the fifth largest search engine in the US with a rather minuscule market share of a couple of percent points.

Google on the other hand never sold and went on to become one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories. It is now one of the most valuable companies in the world with a market cap of $167 billion.

Ask on the other hand has been struggling to grow for many years, without any success maintaining a stable yet small share of the market.