Thursday, February 11, 2010

IAC writes down value of search unit by nearly $1 billion

Will the next step be a merge? I bet so.

"New York-based IAC (NASDAQ: IACI) wrote down $991.9 million from the goodwill on IAC Search & Media, the part of its business that contains Ask.com and also the much smaller Dictionary.com. Goodwill is a company’s guess about the future earning power of an asset or company it has bought. It’s the difference between the price paid for the asset and its book value on the balance sheet. Ask.com started life in Berkeley in 1996 as Ask Jeeves -- it was an early dot-com darling. Later, the business moved to a tower in downtown Oakland and was bought by IAC in 2005 in a deal that valued it at $1.85 billion."

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