Media mogul Barry Diller has expanded his internet holdings with a $1,85-billion purchase of the Ask Jeeves internet search engine, according to a statement on Monday by Diller’s holding company IAC/InterActiveCorp.
Ask Jeeves allows users to ask questions in natural language and is the fifth most-popular search engine in the United States.
The purchase price represented a hefty 16,5% premium on Ask Jeeves’s market value of $1,43-billion, which Diller justified because Ask Jeeves ”has the potential to become one of the great brands on the internet”.
The deal reflects the growing cachet of internet search sites.
These have seen a remarkable resurgence in recent years thanks to the success of Google and a boom in online advertising, which is expected to grow by 24% a year over the next five years, according to Merrill Lynch Equity Research.
Dillers’s IAC already owns Expedia.com, CitySearch, Ticketmaster, the Home Shopping Network and the internet dating site Match.com.
The companies said they will integrate IAC’s brands into the Ask Jeeves service, enhance Ask Jeeves’s local search capabilities — a hotly competitive area among online companies — and promote the Ask Jeeves service on IAC sites.
The news coincided with reports that Yahoo has bought the online photo-sharing service Flickr for a sum of about $50-million. Flickr is a next-generation photo-sharing site that allows users to upload digital images from computers and cameras to a personalised web page where they can post their photos or create photo albums.
The site also helps users to search and categorise other people’s photos. Many of its community-based features will be incorporated into Yahoo photos and across the Yahoo site, the companies said. — Sapa-DPA