At one point not so long ago, Yahoo (s yhoo) was one of the top technology companies in the world. “The only exception [was] Google,” Bassel Ojjeh, a former senior vice president of data technologies and products at Yahoo, said in a recent interview. “… That’s where big data came from. … It didn’t come from Walmart figuring out the connection between diapers and beer.”

Indeed, Yahoo did help shape the modern, data-obsessed web. It spearheaded projects like Hadoop that now run inside nearly every web company around, it eventually pushed Google (s goog) to its limits on search and it showed what the future of content would look like with major efforts around personalization. Companies like Twitter (s twtr), Facebook (s fb) and Netflix (s nflx) would have existed without Yahoo, but their services might look very different.

But in the end, the bigger and badder Google brought…