Remember the hoopla that arose when it was revealed that Casey Anthony allegedly Googled the term "chloroform" either once or eighty-four times?

Ask Jeeves has been dismissed from the search business. The virtual internet butler can at least share his shame with overlord Barry Diller, who is surrendering to a company that treated him little better than a servant.

Barry Diller runs a virtual harem of internet properties at his IAC, but every year he flirts with other startups at the Sun Valley mogulfest. The question this year: Will Diller finally dump Ask.com — and who will he insult?

Cristina Warthen, who worked her way through Stanford Law as an escort and later pled guilty to tax evasion, has been sentenced to one year home detention and ordered to pay $243,000 in back taxes and fines.

Gene Wood, an operations manager at Ask.com, the Barry Diller-owned search engine beloved by Midwestern moms, wrestled a mugger to the ground rather than lose his iPhone, for which he paid $499. While riding on a subway train in San Francisco and watching a movie, Wood felt a hand reach behind him and snatch the…

Ask.com's latest revamp, unveiled by CEO Jim Safka to the New York Times, attempts to dive deeper into the Web, pulling "structured data," a fashionable buzzword, from sources like TV listings and health databases. Give Barry Diller's scrappy search engine, owned by his IAC conglomerate, this much: When at first it…

Geeks always think they will trick the system by being smart. They fail. It's no different when intensely brainy women take up escorting over the Internet, like Stanford Law graduate Cristina Warthen, in court this month facing federal tax evasion charges. As sophisticated as the sex trade is, there's still no magic…

In the second quarter, IAC swung from a $94.6 million profit last year to a $421.6 million loss this year. Don't blame Jakob Lodwick! His former company, Vimeo, is nowhere near the top of IAC/InterActiveCorp's expense report for the past quarter. The real problem at Barry Diller's Internet empire is Cornerstone…

Lexico, the company behind reference sites like Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, has been acquired by also-ran search engine Ask.com, a unit of Barry Diller's IAC, for an undisclosed sum. It will mean an 11 percent boost in traffic for Ask and more revenue for Lexico's sites, as Google had cut a special deal with…

The act that first brought Chadrick Baker, virtual-worlds advocate and lover of love, to our attention was his declaration of romantic fealty to four Valley foxes. Bad news for Sarah Meyers, Amanda Lorenzani, and Sarah Lacy: Baker has found his feelings for Ask.com art director Diana Furka requited. Before declaring…

Ask.com bungled the spelling of Cinco de Mayo, but at least they made an effort. Pictured here are Yahoo's animated mariachis and dancers. But Google, the company well known for its holiday flights of logo fancy? Nada. Yes, it's actually a minor holiday south of the border. But the victory in Puebla over the French…

Barry Diller's IAC is throwing a launch party in New York tonight for new portal Rushmore Drive, which includes an Ask-based search engine manicured to appeal to African-Americans. Fast Company senior editor and blogger Lynne D. Johnson managed to sneak an early screenshot and some marketing messaging online. The…

Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported Ask.com would become a search engine for midwestern women. But now the "Marge Simpson Plan" — as our Ask tipster calls it — is off. Apparently, Ask CEO Jim Safka changed his mind over the weekend and executives spent all day Sunday scrambling to put together a new…

Barry Diller's battle with Liberty Media head John Malone for control over IAC could be over in a week, Diller told a crowd at a Variety event yesterday. "It's very odd that two people who don't want to give up control of anything are giving control to a judge in Delaware," he said. "The wonderful thing about…

Depending on which search-engine marketing firm you believe, Google either had a really good month monetizing is search traffic, or a really poor one. It's so confusing! Seeing HitWise's search market share numbers from the month, I bet competitors Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com are glad they didn't have to worry about…

As Barry Diller curtails both Ask.com's ambitions and its workforce, his hired hand is turning it into the Home Shopping Network of search engines. CEO Jim Safka says 65 percent of its users are female with a high concentration in their late 30s in the Midwest and Southeast. In an attempt to try to get also-ran…