IAC Chair Barry Diller, in an interview with paidContent, noted that organizing local information remains a series of “impossible tasks.”

“There are so many merchants, so connecting [local activity] into a service that gets you the things you want to know about all of those services in one place and then has the commerce relationships, the merchant relationships — talk about impossible tasks,” he said. “Citysearch has been working on it for 10 years, and it’s a third of the way there, 20 percent of the way there. It’s way ahead of everybody else.”

Diller also said he envisions that all the directory businesses are moving online, and he sees a landgrab ahead. “Citysearch and ServiceMagic are so important to us, because nobody has really colonized it yet completely,” he says.