I read a dozen books about Google's origins many years ago and I thought I got it from that. Searching for it today, the closest equivalent source I could find was Myhrvold talking to Joe Kraus in 1995[1]. It's possible that Myrhvold repeated that lecture again to Larry and Sergei which I read in the Google books, or I misremembered and shifted the target of that quote from Excite to Google. I didn't read any book specifically about Excite so not sure why I would have done that. However, it's also possible the authors writing about Google weaved in a side note about Excite which my brain merged into the "Google story". Hopefully, my imperfect recall does not detract from the point that the smart guys at Microsoft misjudged what "search" could become.
