So how do you waste $1.85 billion? Well if you are Barry Diller you acquire Ask.com, the little known and little used search engine, and then years later after failing to compete with Google you close up shop.

Bloomberg is reporting today that IAC, Diller’s company, will be cutting 130 jobs and in the process conceding what little search business it has to its competitors.

Ask.com, a unit of Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, is dismissing engineers based in Edison, New Jersey, and in Hangzhou, China, and ceasing work on its algorithmic search technology, according to Ask.com President Doug Leeds.

The search unit will consolidate its engineering operations at its headquarters in Oakland, California, and focus its resources on developing its online question-and-answer service. Twenty of the engineers currently working in New Jersey will be asked to relocate to Oakland, the company said.

Leeds said that Google has become too powerful a competitor to justify Ask.com’s continued pursuit of those search users.

“It’s become this huge juggernaut of a company that we really thought we could compete against by innovating,” Leeds said in an interview. “We did a great job of holding our market share but it wasn’t enough to grow the way IAC had hoped we would grow when it bought us.”

So how do you waste $1.85 Billion? is a post from: The Inquisitr

What happens when you get a bunch of rich old pricks gathering together for yet another conference and the talk turns to how poor they are and how it’s the Internet’s fault?

Well you get people like Barry Diller (who looks surprising like a older version of Steve Ballmer) pontification about how the web will return to its glory days of when you paid for stuff – and all within five years. Yes folks by the time five years rolls by we will be forking over cash for all that stuff we are getting for free today.

“I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free days into a paid system. Inevitably, I promise you, it will be paid,” Diller said in a keynote discussion opening up the Advertising 2.0 conference held at his company’s futuristic glass building alongside the Hudson River in Manhattan. “Not every single thing, but anything of value. “

The fact that content and services on the Internet so far have been largely supplied for no charge is “an accident of historical moment that will be corrected,” he said, in an era of “creative chaos” that will span the next three to five years.

Source: Between The Lines

It’s not a matter that businesses are going to have to find new ways to be profitable in the era of Web 2.0 (or if you prefer Web 3.0 or Scoble’s favorite 2010Web). No it will be us suddenly realize that out of the goodness of our hearts that we should be paying companies for the privilege of being able to keep on doing business as usual. Even though those business models are proving all on their own that they don’t work.

Diller goes on to add

The entire Internet, in effect, would become an app – or content – store.

“That little thing – that in fact that you scroll it, you do it, it comes, everything else is taken care of, is the answer to what’s going to happen on the Internet, when in fact, you get the applicability of that broadly across the Internet,” Diller said. “It’s absolutely going to happen.”

So in effect the Web becomes nothing more than a gigantic iTunes store with the old guard once again charging what they think is a fair price and walking away with all the profits.

Okay Barry, what ever you say. How about you and I getting back together in five years and see exactly how wrong you were.

Diller pulls a dilly, says the web will become a paid system is a post from: The Inquisitr