Barry Diller on 'foolish' Microsoft, 'smart' AOL and much more

Microsoft's Bing may be the fastest-growing player in the search market, but IAC chairman Barry Diller doesn't seem to think much of its prospects.

Diller told attendees of the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference on Wednesday that he believes trying to beat Google at its own game, as Bing is doing, is a losing proposition. "When you have two thirds of the business [as Google does], if you think you can be head-on with them, I think that's real foolishness," he said.

Of course, Diller's own company competes in the search market, but Ask.com is a different kind of creature, he says, relying on human intelligence rather than algorithms. "It doesn't have a lot of share, but it has scale," he says. "I think over time, it really can compete."