“We have certainly not bitten an inch out of the hide of Google,” Diller said earlier this week. “I’ve been daunted by the progress of that. … The challenge of the year … is to get people to try [Ask], experiment with it and then adopt it.”

With that in mind, Diller’s making some changes. Ask.com Chief Executive Officer Jim Lanzone–who claimed the CEO spot in April 2006 when Steve Berkowitz took a job at Microsoft–is leaving the company in a management shake-upr that will see former Match.com CEO Jim Safka take his place.

News of the leadership change comes as Ask parent InterActiveCorp prepares to spin off its HSN (Home Shopping Network), Ticketmaster, Interval International and LendingTree properties. “These changes are intended to strengthen and streamline the operating structure at IAC, both leading up to our intended spin-offs, and beyond,” said IAC CEO Diller.

Well, we’ll have to see about that. Certainly, Safka seems like a worthy candidate for the job. As CEO of Match.com from 2004 to 2006, he grew the site’s membership and revenues substantially. That said, Lanzone is also a very smart guy. If he wasn’t able to turn Ask into a legitimate player in the search market, one wonders if anyone can.

Like its “algorithm” ad campaign, Ask.com’s redesign is certainly getting its fair share of attention, but will it gain the company some market share as well? Because as the inveterate fifth-place contestant in what’s rapidly becoming Google’s one-player market, Ask could certainly use it.

Dubbed “Ask 3D,” the company’s redesign seems at once an answer to Google’s new Universal Search system and a step beyond the search sovereign’s spartan user interface. It boasts a number of impressive new features and an elegant look and feel with which the company hopes to differentiate itself. “There are a lot more types of content online than there were a few years ago,” Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone told the New York Times. “But the search experience still looks like it did in 1996.”

No kidding. But try telling that to Google sometime.

Anyway … while it might appeal to some, Ask.com’s improved interface isn’t likely to make much of a difference in the brutish battle for search-engine market share. There isn’t much sustainable competitive advantage in new interfaces–they’re too easily copied by rivals. But then Ask doesn’t need much, does it? The search business is enormously profitable. As Microsoft’s Don Dodge recently noted, every market-share point in search is worth a billion dollars or more. So if Ask 3D ends up lifting the company’s share of all searches even slightly, it’s a success.