> In inclined to believe that neither would have become trillion dollar companies if they had been acquired by Yahoo.

Yeah exactly. Also I would consider the Overture acquisition extremely successful because their patent lawsuit v. Google gave them 8% of Google pre-IPO. If held (which it was not), that is a substantial asset today.

You are spot on, but you are drawing a slightly wrong conclusion, IMHO:

Yes, Overture what the best Yahoo! acquisition ever made.

But Yahoo!'s greatest mistake was to settle the Google lawsuit for a few million dollars - which meant that Google could keep using Overture's (parented) invention of keyword bidding based advertising; without it, Google may never have found a way to become profitable.

So Yahoo! bought its own gravestone for $50m, when all they would have had to do is stand firm and go to trial. If Y! exercised its government-awarded monopoly rights for keyword auction based advertising, there may still be that Y! portal that was so prominent in the early 2000s.

PS: Yahoo Inc. is not full gone - Yahoo Japan remains the last independent part of the former Y! - see https://www.yahoo.co.jp .

They had 8% of Google at one point and sold it?!