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For most of his career the fearsome Barry Diller has been acclaimed as a brilliant visionary who invented the TV movie of the week, ran Paramount Pictures and created a fourth broadcast network when the Big Three dominated the dial. Today Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, controls an enviable array of Web sites with overlapping sweet spots in three markets:travel, home buying and people who still go out on dates.

So how did he get here? By having no grand vision at all. "We're just opportunistic." Ask what the Next Big Thing on the Web will be and he says, "I have no clue." As for his pile of properties:"We discovered them in the serendipitous way that things can happen."

Diller, 63, says his Internet foray is far from finished--and that investors are making a mistake by turning their backs on the Net. "I'm not finished, because I'm still curious," he says. "The revolution of the Internet is not over. There's opportunity, and if you're curious and there's opportunity, who knows what kind of trouble you can get into?"

He began his online odyssey in 1992 when he quit Fox and fell in love with his PowerBook laptop. The only thing he knew for certain, he says, was that everything was about to change. A year later he was profiled in the New Yorker--and in 8,100 words the Internet wasn't mentioned a single time. He thought interactive TV was the key, joining QVC and later acquiring Home Shopping Network.

But in 1999 he made his first big Web purchase, paying $245 million for Hotels.com. He wasn't sure why: "It was nothing but instinct." Diller had opposed the idea but was pushed into it by a minion on his staff, a strategic planner who hadn't yet hit 30 (Dara Khosrowshahi, now 36 and chief executive of Expedia, which split off from IAC last month). "We have raging discussions," Diller says, and employees have "no fear about calling their chairman an idiot. And their chairman likes to hear it because it makes him listen." Good thing:Hotels.com throws off $170 million a year in free cash, valuing it at $3 billion.

By 2002 Diller had dropped his old focus on television to begin loading up on Web sites. IAC sold off the USA Network and other cable assets to Vivendi Universal for $11 billion, holding on to a 5% Vivendi stake (which brought $3.4 billion in a sale to NBC earlier this year). Going online, IAC has acquired all or part of 19 Web sites in four years for a total of upward of $10 billion. The push started with a move to buy a 65% stake in Expedia from Microsoft for $1.5 billion.

In 2003 Diller's shopping spree picked up. In travel he bought the rest of Expedia, the rest of Hotels.com and the Hotwire discount-travel site. IAC also acquired a dating siteand, for home buyers, RealEstate.com and LendingTree.com. Still more deals came last year.

Diller made one of his boldest bets in July, when IAC paid $1.9 billion in stock to buy an also-ran search site, Ask Jeeves. All past media business was based on scarcity, but the Net is "the opposite of scarcity. It's infinite, and global search is probably going to be the entrance for most people's activity," Diller says.

IAC now focuses on the myriad ways people are moving aspects of their daily lives to the Net. "Most experiences are being transformed by the Internet," he says. "That transformation is at the heart of everything we do. We find situations that are in some form of transformation, and we've been lucky to dive into most of them before anyone noticed." The Net bubble's burst has made this all more affordable, he adds.

Sounds like a vision to us.

Diller decided late last year to break up IAC into two companies with separate stocks; shareholders approved the split, which took effect last month. One company, Expedia, owns the travel businesses, which had accounted for 60% of total IAC earnings. The other, IAC, will include the Ask portal and everything else. Diller, IAC's chief executive, controls a 7%stake in IAC and a 7% stake in Expedia.

In the early Nineties, when he quit Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Diller had tired of working as a richly paid employee and wanted to build his own empire. Worth $345 million back then, he has quadrupled his wealth to $1.4 billion today. Murdoch is up only 60% in that time, to $6.7 billion.

Now many Diller-watchers believe he is about to complete his transformation from TV titan to Web mogul by peddling off Home Shopping Network, which IAC still owns, to archrival QVC, controlled by John Malone's Liberty Media. Home Shopping could be worth $4.5 billion--a nice windfall for buying still more Web sites.

Diller won't comment on such a deal, but during a recent interview in his New York office he sprang from his chair to take a phone call--from JohnMalone. "Maybe he's making an offer," Diller teased. He believes he possesses one advantage over his old-media brethren: a genuine willingness to dive into Internet ventures while the media guys reluctantly test the waters because they feel forced to. "We are the only ones who are plying the Internet in a microbusiness fashion," Diller says. "That's either smart or stupid. Since we are doing it, I'd like to think it's smart."