Ask Jeeves offered $2 Billion from Barry Diller Corp

Posted by Lee Odden on Mar 20th, 2005 in Online Marketing |

IAC and Ask Jeeves are not officially commenting yet, but plenty of media and blogs are in regard to a $2 billion stock deal for IAC to acquire Ask Jeeves.

New York Times: “IAC/Interactive Corp., the Internet company headed by Barry Diller, is close to an agreement to acquire Ask Jeeves Inc., the nation’s fourth-largest search engine company.”

Wall Street Journal:
“Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp last night was near a deal to purchase the fifth-largest Web-search service, Ask Jeeves Inc., for around $2 billion in stock, according to people familiar with the matter, marking an aggressive move by the electronic-commerce company into the Internet’s most competitive arena.”

There’s already a ton of coverage on this today. SEW does a fine job summing up with links to more details. Great news for Ask Jeeves, but will this really help them become more than the 4th largest search engine company behind MSN, Yahoo and Google?

Tags: Ask Jeeves, IAC, InterActiveCorp