Five years ago this week… Verizon threw Yahoo a life jacket, buying the core assets of the firm – search, email, messenger, Flurry and Tumblr – for $4.8 billion. This highly expected acquisition was a quick follow-up to Verizon’s $4.4 billion purchase of AOL, with both deals giving the US telco giant some serious advertising clout. Despite being surpassed by Google in every way imaginable, at the time, Yahoo still had a billion regularly monthly users and was the fifth most visited website in the US. Unfortunately, the purchase did not cover Yahoo’s 15% stake in Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba, which made up most of the former’s $35.8 billion valuation. This all came to an end just months ago, as…