Barry Diller won a court battle today against Liberty Media’s John Malone. Now Diller can finally go ahead with his plan to break up InterActive Corp. into five pieces—HSN, Ticketmaster, Lending Tree, Interval International, and the new IAC (Ask.com, Bloglines, Citysearch, Evite, iWon, Match.com, BustedTees, Vimeo, GarageGames, and CollegeHumor). Malone, IAC’s largest shareholder, was trying to prevent the spin-offs from happening.

Whether the financial maneuver will “unlock” any value for shareholders remains to be seen. (I’d be surprised if it did). But there is no doubt that IAC is an unwieldy, multi-headed beast whose collection of disparate businesses never really had much to do with one another. As I reported last November:

Diller will continue as CEO and chairman of IAC, which still remains somewhat of a grab bag of about 30 Websites. But at least those businesses are starting to finally be able to stand on their own feet. It doesn’t make much sense for them to be weighed down by Lending Tree because of the mortgage credit crisis or overshadowed by the Home Shopping Network. IAC’s holding company model gave shelter to its startups with the earnings of its more established operations, but any troubles in the larger businesses are difficult for the smaller ones to overcome no matter how fast they are growing.

The problem, as came out during the trial, is that those underlying Web businesses are not growing as fast as Diller had hoped either. Ask.com failed to reach its goal of doubling its market share of search, and Ticketmaster missed out on the growth of the secondary ticket market and recently had to buy TicketsNow for $265 million to compete with StubHub (owned by eBay).

Can an independent IAC compete more effectively against Web startups, or is it just a collection of Web 1.0 dogs?

(Photo by JDLasica).

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Rumors last week that Ask, the IAC-owned search engine, was about to cut 100 jobs overestimated the body count. In fact, Ask is trimming 40 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce. Newly appointed CEO Jim Safka, who replaced Jim Lanzone, is also going to refocus the brand to go after women in their late 30s and older, who already make up a disproportionate amount of Ask’s users (65 percent).

No word on what will happen to Ask’s Teoma search technology (the rumor was that Google would be replacing it, since it already handles Ask’s search advertising). Safka is obviously taking more of a marketing than a technology approach. But without improving actual search results (with technology), Ask is going to have a tough time maintaining its 4.5 percent market share. Ask’s search sites collectively brought in 41 million unique U.S. visitors in January, which was up from December and November, but still below October’s 44 million, according to comScore.

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While Google dominates the top slot in search both in the U.S. and worldwide, with a global search market share of 62 percent, there is still a lot of elbowing going on below, especially when you look beyond the U.S.

In a comScore ranking of the top-10 global search engines as measured by number of searches during the month of December, 2007, Yahoo comes in at a distant No. 2 with only 13 percent of global share. (Although, in the U.S., Yahoo actually gained a half-point of share in December, whereas Google dipped 0.2 percent). The big surprise, though, is the strength of local search engines in countries that don’t use the Roman alphabet. No. 3 on the list is not Microsoft, but Chinese search engine Baidu (with 5 percent share, versus Microsoft’s 3 percent). No. 5 is Korea’s NHN Corporation, which operates the Naver portal and search engine. Creeping up on Ask’s No. 8 spot, is Russian search engine Yandex. And Alibaba (which may include Yahoo China) brings up the rear at No. 10.

Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? These market share figures suggest that culture and marketing play a big role as well—unless, of course, you are Google.

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