IAC will keep its Media & Advertising sectory, which includes Ask.com, and its Emerging Businesses sector, along with a handful of investments in other firms.

However, the IAC board has decided a few brands and their underlying parts will have to fend for themselves in the marketplace. Lending Tree received particular attention from IAC chairman Barry Diller during the company’s third quarter earnings announcement, as that unit suffered from the global real estate and lending slowdown.

The moves take IAC out of the mortgage, event ticketing, travel, and most shopping businesses that had been under the corporate umbrella.

"I’ve always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors," said Diller in a statement.

Those spun-off units provided IAC with the resources it needed to invest in Internet brands, like Ask. Now that those Internet business units have begun to show "real scale" according to Diller, it became time to cut loose the other companies.

Finding Horror Stories With Google

For Halloween this year, Google opens up its chest to show off the public domain contents of Book Search. The bloodiest and most ghoulish classics are available through Google’s Scary Stories page.

Dracula’s in there – yeah, he sucks – and so is Frankenstein, Mr. Hyde, as well as The Withered Arm.

And of course, they didn’t leave out the master, Edgar Allen Poe, and links to A Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Raven.

They can be transferred like ghosts in the machine by downloading the PDF version. There is also a link to where bound editions can be purchased.

Here’s a real life horror story:

Poupon Google: An American Search Engine In Paris

Google’s Book Search, the spawn of Google Print for Libraries project, a grand plan to index millions of books and make them searchable with the help of America and England’s top libraries, has struck fear among publishers worldwide.

Though it has been shown to increase book sales for works still under copyright (Google only makes snippets of copyrighted work available and then links to where books can be purchased), publishers and authors have balked at whether or not it is acceptable to make digital copies for indexing in the first place.

France was so upset about it last year that the country’s head librarian called together the entire European Union to discuss a strategy to combat it – except for England who is allegedly part of the anglophile conspiracy to uproot native cultures through squelching foreign languages and presenting history through a decidedly Anglican slant.

Their horror became three-fold as the Anglican community mocked their accusations of omni-Googlization and the cultural imperialism that traveled across the Atlantic with it. This was followed by Quaero, the French’s answer to Google, which nearly died on the operating table before becoming a whining apparition haunting the Internet.

Google Print For Libraries, they say, is still out there, terrorizing publishers and French librarians to this day. Today, reports WebProNews’ Doug Caverly, French publishers are suing Google, partly because of the horrifying way books are portrayed on the site with ragged edged graphics, making their work look “one step away from the trashcan.” Oh, the horror!

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