Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp which owns Ask.com has announced its decision to acquire Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. The deal was made with the sites’ owner Lexico Publishing and the estimated sale price is around $100 million.

A similar acquisition was attempted last year by rival site Answers.com, but the deal eventually fell through.

Ask.com’s new chief executive, Jim Safka, refused to offer any details on the terms of the deal but an official statement is expected to follow in the next few days. Still, he presented the company’s plan to keep Ask.com a general-purpose search engine. He also presented Lexico as a "lean and fast growing business with rapid top and bottom line growth," as quoted by the Guardian, which represents a natural addition to their company.

The Ask Network was presented by the IAC/InterActiveCorp officials as one of the most popular web sites in the world, placing 9th with over 145 million monthly unique users and surpassing other popular sites such as Facebook.

The takeover represents Ask.com’s effort to enlarge its number of queries on its site by a cycle traffic between the web pages. Dictionary.com registered over 15 million visitors in March alone and its numbers are increasing continously. The web sites also sell a series of ads which is also a very profitable activity.

At this point, Ask.com places fourth on a global search engine list, with the first three spots taken by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.