The owner of traditionally fifth-ranked search engine Ask.com, Barry Diller's IAC, will complete its break-up into five different companies within three to four weeks, and the company will hang on closely to the search engine.

"I expect [the] new IAC to exceed the current size of IAC," said the high-profile CEO, in making the announcement at IAC's annual shareholders meeting in New York City this morning. "It will be focused on an area of the Internet I'm still very curious about."

Diller cited the fast growth of the highly competitive search market, where Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL -- all of which rank higher according to industry measurements from Comscore -- are also vying hard to pick up share against industry leader Google. As previously reported in BetaNews, IAC will be spinning off properties that include Ticketmaster; Interval Leisure Group, a time-share network; HSN (Home Shopping Network and the Cornerstone catalog business); and Tree.com (encompassing Lending Tree.com and other real estate and finance businesses).

Aside from Ask.com, IAC will retain leading dating service Match.com as part of its core business. IAC purchased Ask.com -- a search service originally dubbed Ask Jeeves -- back in 2005.

Public trading of the four new offshoots of IAC is expected to begin as early as next week.