I'm old enough to remember gopher, then mosaic, then netscape navigator, and a web that had only a few dozen sites. Then there was altavista and metacrawler, and of course yahoo. In our (physics) department of 20 people back in the 90s and 00s, no-one ever used yahoo: its 'directory' listing of websites never sat well with any of us, and we never used it: it just felt wrong and cumbersome. In fact the longer yahoo stayed around the more we joked about it. I am still astonished yahoo is still around now, I always felt it was doomed to failure back in the 90s.
I wonder if we will be reading this site in 10 years (or its successor) and see a title "When Facebook Reigned Supreme" about how a monolithic social network was seen as a gateway to everything having to do with your friends and interests.
This article is from 2014. A few things have changed since then. For example, Google now does offer ads in the Play Store: <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-play.html" rel="nofollow">http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-...</a>