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IAC/Interactive Corp will spin off the travel site, along with Hotels.com and Hotwire, into a separate company.

Barry Diller, IAC's CEO, saw shareholders approve the proposal to spin Expedia off from the company, according to the Wall Street Journal. Dara Khosrowshahi will become Expedia's CEO. Mr. Khosrowshahi has been IAC's executive VP and CFO previously.

The travel site and its other properties will trace on NASDAQ. Analyst firm Piper Jaffray said in December that the sum of IAC's parts was "greater than the whole." IAC will continue to operate several online properties, including Match.com and LendingTree.

This will be the second spin off for Expedia. The service was formerly owned by Microsoft and was created to be a component for that company's MSN service. But Microsoft spun off Expedia in 1999.

Mr. Diller's firm acquired search engine Ask Jeeves earlier this year, and his company seems ready to do for that property what Mr. Diller did for News Corp when he helped created the Fox TV network nearly 20 years ago.

According to MSNBC, IAC has the financial resources to make an assault at search engine leader Google's place atop the search market.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.