As Marissa Mayer an-nounced the $4.8bn acquisition of Yahoo’s operating business by Verizon, the US telecoms company, she gave a eulogy to the company she has headed for four years. Yahoo “humanised and popularised the web, email [and] search”, she said.

It was a backhanded compliment, given that less “universally well-liked companies” have overtaken the enterprise with the exclamation mark in two decades, including Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon. Ms Mayer identified the problem: Yahoo started as a link directory compiled by its founders and remained all too human.

Yahoo’s valuation grew to $128bn in spring 2000 because of investors’ faith that human curation could beat search engines — people browsing on slow dial-up lines needed a human interface. But technology triumphed over humanity. The internet was more powerful than they imagined and all that was left for Yahoo was likeability.