The suit, filed in a Charlotte federal court, is against a company called Mortech, which provides a technology that LendingTree uses to automate lender offer pricing. LendingTree says it has an exclusive contract with Mortech, but it recently discovered that the company was also working with Google–which LendingTree claims plans to launch a loan aggregation service in late August or early September.

Google declined to comment on the suit. As for its plans in the mortgage business, a spokesman said, “we are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the U.S.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Gifts.com President & CEO William Lynch, who founded the site for IAC (IACI), will transition to HSN full-time as its EVP of marketing and content. He had previously been managing the HSN.com site, while also running Gifts.com.

The site, which also offers gift cards that can be redeemed at over 100 merchants, is now a 40-person operation.

Rapp has been with IAC since 2006 and, prior to joining the company, worked at the New York Times Company.

After a contentious battle with large shareholder Liberty Media, IAC is in the midst of separating itself into five publicly traded companies, expected to be completed in the third quarter, spinning off HSN, Ticketmaster, Interval International and LendingTree.

Left in the new IAC will be: Ask.com, Bloglines, Citysearch, CursorMania, Evite, Excite, IAC Advertising Solutions, InsiderPages, iWon, My Fun Cards, My Way, Popular Screensavers, Smiley Central, Vimeo, Webfetti and Zwinky, Match.com, ServiceMagic, Shoebuy.com, Entertainment Publications, ReserveAmerica; Pronto, Gifts.com, Green.com, Primal Ventures, InstantAction, BustedTees, CollegeHumor, GarageGames, RushmoreDrive.com, Very Short List, and 23/6.

Also included will IAC’s current investments in Active.com, Brightcove, FiLife, MerchantCircle, OpenTable, Points.com and SHOP Channel.

Barry Diller needs almost no introduction–he is one of the best-known executives in the U.S., straddling a number of industries, including entertainment, online and retail. Well known, too, for his biting wit and gimlet gaze, he has recently been embroiled in a high-profile battle for control of IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACI) with major investor John Malone, another noted mogul. What’s been at stake are some of the Web’s most famous names, including HSN, Ticketmaster, LendingTree, Match.com, Ask.com, CitySearch and Evite.

And then there’s Diller’s other company, travel services outfit Expedia, whose shares are surging this morning on market rumors that Diller is planning on taking it private.

• Describing him as “my favorite mogul,” Kara welcomes Diller to the stage. Is that John “Darth Vader” Malone’s light saber jutting out of his back pocket?
• Tell me what happened with Malone, Kara says, referring to Diller’s recent dust-up with Liberty Capital’s (LCAPA) John Malone
• For both John Malone and me, putting our lives in the hands of a judge in Delaware is not a desire of mine. And it was very painful–too personal. For three months my life was completely interrupted. As a friend of mine said to me, when a lawsuit is filed against you, you’re only as good as you were the day before it was filed.
• Kara presses for more details. I don’t think in their hearts our shareholders felt they could overturn the shareholder agreement that had been in effect for so long, Diller says. But clearly, they felt they could shake me up a bit. Kara recalls one shareholder telling her his goals was to “humiliate Diller.”

  

• “I don’t know how long I’ll be at this,” Diller muses. “Maybe as long as Rupert … certainly not as long as Sumner, however old he is, wherever he is, alive or dead.”

• Diller talking about the difficulties of wrangling employees of a company as large as IAC. Kara: “So what is IAC now?” Diller says come August, IAC will be a series of five different businesses all related to one another through Internet life. He describes IAC as a business-organizing principle.
• Kara asks what benefits that strategy offers. Search engine optimization for one thing, says Diller.
• Shifting gears a bit: What does Diller see himself getting involved in in the future? Diller says he’s been seeking out trouble and trying to solve it, but what he’d like to do is make trouble. “The truth is,” says Diller, “if you have a decent idea and there’s a business model to it, you need to stay with it.”
• Kara asks about the Hollywood writers strike. Diller: Hollywood is a community that’s so inbred, it’s a wonder the children have any teeth. … How dumb can you be to allow a writers’ strike during a time when there’s such a huge play being made for the TV audience?

• Moving on to search. How’s Ask.com doing? Diller: Well, we’re not No. 5 …
• Kara asks for Diller’s thoughts on Microhoo. Diller says one party is very smart, the other not so much. Which is which, asks Kara. Diller: I’ll leave that to you to decide. A few moments later, he says he doubts Yahoo will remain independent.
• Kara asks: Is the Microsoft-Yahoo deal a good idea? Diller thinks it is. That said, he also feels Ask is successful, “Google is irrelevent to Ask” and Ask’s product is superior to Google’s. So take that previous comment with a grain of salt. “For us,” says Diller, “Google is not the issue.” He then goes on to note that Google controls about 60% of the search market in which Ask competes. Diller seems to think that someday, when Ask has increased its queries enough it will get an opening, Google will stumble and Ask will triumph.
• Kara asks about Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. Diller says it’s meaningless, but adds that Facebook is a great service. It’s got nice tools that draw you in and keep you engaged. Diller doesn’t like the term most often used to describe Facebook, though. “Social networks … that’s a dumb-ass phrase if I ever heard one.”
• Diller notes that community, which is what drives Facebook, is what has made TripAdvisor so successful.
• Kara asks about Hulu. Diller dismisses it as a distribution tool. it might become something else, but that’s all it is right now.
• Diller goes from talking about “tools” to “post-tools” and something or other converging with something else. He also mentions that micro-payments will have to be instituted as well.
• Moving on to Q and A: How do you distinguish tenacity from stupidity? Diller: I think there is a certain amount of stupidity in tenacity. Once you get something out in the marketplace there is always going to be someone who takes issue with it. It’s OK to be a little bit stupid, as long you don’t bet the farm at the same time.

For more coverage, see Barron’s Tech Trader Daily and The Wall Street Journal.

A note about our coverage: This live blog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations expeditiously written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

“I am beginning to think these people are insane. … Everything they cite is hogwash.”

That’s what is known as a classic Barry Diller, who can be relied on to come out with a good one when provoked.

In this case, the provocateur is Liberty Media’s John Malone (pictured on the right in this comic with Diller), whose company has headed to court to try to remove Diller from his job as chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

As chronicled by the always deft Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal today, the fight between the longtime partners is getting uglier still with–oh, let’s just admit it–totally confusing moves and countermoves about the fate of IAC and its subsidiaries.

Liberty has a giant stake in all of these entities and Diller, of course, has control of that stake. A recipe for mogul mud wrestling, if ever there was one.

But the fight is a serious one for a number of high-profile Web companies within IAC, which was being restructured to stop just this kind of fighting between Diller and Malone.

Just how Diller has gone about rejiggering it all, in complicated spin-offs in a way that allegedly undercuts Liberty’s control yet again, is what set the new round of tensions off.

Those sites embroiled in the fighting include: Expedia, TicketMaster, LendingTree and Ask.

As luck would have it, Diller will be interviewed onstage at the sixth edition of D: All Things Digital in late May, so there will be plenty to talk about!

The last time I interviewed him at the Monaco Media Forum last November, Diller let loose too, when he memorably scoffed at the $15 billion valuation for Facebook and Microsoft’s $240 million investment in the hot social network.

“If it was real money, it would be insane, but since it isn’t really, then why bother [worrying about it],” said Diller. “It doesn’t mean anything, it is a phantom, false valuation. Let them sell for $14 billion, $998 million, and then I’ll believe them.”

Here is a sampling of quotes from my one-on-one interview with him onstage at the Monaco Media Forum on Friday morning, taken from the not-so-audible audio of my Flip video camera. But you’ll get the idea of why Diller (pictured here) remains one of the more robust characters out there.

We began talking about the split of IAC into five parts, lopping off unrelated businesses, with the backdrop of a struggle he has been engaged in with Liberty Media’s John Malone.

Why do it? “We were being superficial managers,” said Diller. For example, of the mortgage business around LendingTree, he said: “I have little to no interest and that is not how I want to live my life.”

(Very few execs, I can assure you, will admit to rank corporate boredom about their businesses.)

But Diller was just getting started, taking shots at everything from the “dumb” Hollywood writers’ strike to the insanity of Facebook’s $15 billion valuation, as well as his own corporate shortcomings.

About the idea of synergy among his many properties, which he once touted effusively: “I still believe in synergy, but I call it natural law. They have to naturally fit into each other. The problem is that there was so much huffing and puffing to fit them together.”

(Again, it’s nice to hear someone admit when things just don’t work.)

Diller also took aim at Google, within a week of signing a big guaranteed ad deal with it for IAC’s Ask search network. “It has huge market share, and I don’t believe in the long run it will be able to keep up with it,” he said.

(In this, he is dead right, and the lack of search innovation at Google is troubling.)

While letting Yahoo off the hook for its management woes, Diller did marvel at Microsoft’s inability to compete in the online business. “Microsoft is a greater failure really, if you think about it, with a huge amount of capital and no real traction,” he said.

Diller also noted that the writers’ strike in Hollywood was silly, noting that the writers were striking over virtually nothing. “No one can solve an issue where there is no economic model yet,” he said. “Over the next five years, the market will develop, and at the end of that period, if the economic value is being created, [the studios] will sit in good faith and give [the writers] the money.”

(I am not so sure the writers should trust a bunch of execs who have shafted them so many times when it relates to technology, although Diller is correct that there are no real revenues to speak of yet.)

Lastly, he scoffed at the recent $15 billion valuation for Facebook and Microsoft’s $240 million investment in the hot social network, noting it was simply a move to thwart Google by the software giant.

“If it was real money, it would be insane, but since it isn’t really, then why bother [worrying about it],” said Diller. “It doesn’t mean anything, it is a phantom, false valuation. Let them sell for $14 billion, $998 million, and then I’ll believe them.”

Me too.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.