Just one week after showing how committed he was to exploiting the black community, IAC chief Barry Diller has been slapped with a race discrimination lawsuit.
Diller, who just celebrated a courtroom victory over Liberty Media’s John Malone, is being targeted by a former Home Shopping Network employee, Armanda Vernon, who says “she was turned down for numerous internal jobs despite being well-qualified” and that “her treatment fit a pattern of anti-black treatment at HSN.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for IAC told Page Six “Vernon filed a charge of race discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May, and they found insufficient evidence to support her allegations.”
Can Diller’s company really be guilty of racist employment practices when it just launched Rushmore Drive, the black search engine that makes it easier for African-Americans to find soul food Thanksgiving recipes?
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Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC, which owns Ask.com, Match.com, Evite, and College Humor, among many others, has just launched Rushmore Drive, a new online community geared toward blacks and centered around an ???ethnic,??? Ask.com-powered search engine that delivers both mainstream results and results targeted toward African Americans. ???Every person is looking for a more relevant search result,??? Johnny Taylor, head of IAC???s Black Web Enterprises Inc. unit and chief executive of RushmoreDrive.com, told the Charlotte Observer. ???It recognizes who you are, so you can find what you???re looking for every time.???
Is that true? Just to test out that theory, and being of the core demographic, I searched some general terms on both Rushmore Drive and Ask.com to see how the first-page results differed.