WHAT A COINCIDENCE! Barry Diller, the IAC mogul behind the new black-centered Web site, RushmoreDrive.com, is being sued by an employee of HSN, another of his holdings, for racial discrimination. "The St. Petersburg Press reports that Armanda Vernon, who is African-American, claims that "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."'

According to Diller's lawyer, Vernon previously tried to file this complaint with the EEOC, and they didn't find the evidence sufficient enough to take on the case. I wonder what comes up with you put "workplace discrimination" into RushmoreDrive's handy "ethnic" search engine. [NYP]

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. The first result on Rushmore Drive was usually something mainstream like Travelocity or Monster.com, but the subsequent results were very clearly pointed in the "African American" direction, but not always helpfully so. Ex: My search for "food" yielded "Chitterlings.com." So not interested. You sort of get the idea that the Rushmore Drive engine just adds "black and African American" to your search terms. I'm not planning on switching from Google anytime soon, but it should be interesting to see how it evolves with more use. Plus, when I searched "blog," Stereohyped wasn't on the first page. Boo.

Check out some selections from my experiment after the jump.

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