As one of the least conspicuous online real estate aggregators in recent years, Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) has always made big waves with big acquisitions. Yesterday it got the market excited again with a healthy March quarter report that fueled a 5% gain in its stock.

IAC posted earnings of $0.09 a share -- or $0.22 a share on an adjusted basis -- as revenues climbed by 16% to hit $1.65 billion. The company, in the process of shelling out $1.85 billion for AskJeeves.com (NASDAQ:ASKJ) and spinning off most of its travel-related sites as Expedia, is a collection of seemingly eclectic properties at first glance: Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Citysearch, Lending Tree.

They might appear to be peculiarly shaped puzzle pieces, but they all do fit together. After all, someone trying to explore a city's hotspots at Citysearch may also be interested in going through Ticketmaster to buy some event passes and booking travel through Hotwire, Hotels.com or Expedia. If she has such a great time in the new city that she wants to move there, she could turn to RealEstate.com, Lending Tree and HSN.com to find, finance and furnish her new home.

But the market hasn't exactly grasped that concept, and IAC's stock has been cut in half since peaking in the summer of 2003. IAC believes in itself, enough to put its money where its mouth is by diverting some of its $4.2 billion cash reserve toward share buybacks. The more you look, the more likely it is that you will believe in IAC as well.

Just like CNET (NASDAQ:CNET), another company that has been busy acquiring choice patches of real estate despite the market's apathetic stance, IAC has assembled an impressive portfolio. While Diller is often celebrated as a master dealmaker, perhaps the best kept secret with IAC is that the deals -- in sum -- make perfect sense. While the company hasn't connected all of the interlocking pieces, there is a real synergy there. Why is it that the same market that understood what eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) was up to when it scooped up Half.com and PayPal, or why it made sense when Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) acquired Blogger and Dejanews, disregards the bigger picture at IAC?

As long as it still smells like an opportunity, does it really matter? While the spinoff will pose the interesting challenge of which appendage to root for (Expedia is growing faster, but there's a lot of good stuff staying with the flagship company), IAC is still an entity that appears undervalued at a little more than 20 times this year's profit targets.

Pity Wall Street. It only pays up when the puzzles come pre-assembled.

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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story though he has been a frequent freelance contributor to IAC's Citysearch.com site. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.