William Lansing is president, CEO and board member at InfoSpace Inc., the Bellevue internet search company. A former NBC internet executive with an e-commerce background, he joined InfoSpace in February 2009. He spoke to the TechFlash about the company’s plans for acquisitions, working with Jack Welch at GE, and the great outdoors.

You’re approaching your one-year anniversary with InfoSpace. What’s it been like? It’s been an interesting year. We’ve gotten stronger over the course of the year. We’ve seen increasing growth in our business. We’ve seen the online ad market come back a bit. The environment is better ... We have a little over $200 million in cash on hand. A significant part of our strategy is to deploy that cash on acquisitions.

What kind of acquisitions? We’re looking fairly broadly. We start by looking in the online search business, and we move outward from there. We start with consumer-facing businesses that rely in some shape or form on the internet. But we don’t want to be constrained by that. If an opportunity presented itself outside that space, we would look at it.

InfoSpace recently launched a website called Haggle that lets people bid on computers, electronics and other things. What was the thinking behind that? If we can find businesses that are interesting and we can leverage our engineers and marketing people to get into those businesses, we will give it a try. With Haggle, we put a reasonable-sized group of talented individuals on building it. And in a matter of months, we’ve built the business from scratch and launched it, and we’re in a good position. We’re likely to launch other businesses in that way.

Why auctions? We think hard about how we’re going to be distinctive. So in an auction kind of business, we’re not interested in going toe-to-toe with eBay, which does its auction business fairly well ... Haggle has got an unusual business model in that you pay for bids and you have extremely attractive prices typically when the auction closes. You have an entertainment shopping experience as well as a big bargain.

Do you have metrics for Haggle? We do, but we haven’t disclosed them. But I would say we’re happy with the early results so far.

Infospace has spent the past few years shedding assets to focus on internet search. Now you’re launching Haggle and talking about acquisitions outside of search. What’s going on? I think it’s fair to say tremendous fair value was built by (previous CEO) Jim Voelker in shedding those assets over the last several years, and shareholders were rewarded with handsome dividends. The hope is that building new organic businesses like Haggle and making acquisitions will all lead to creation of additional shareholder value ... I would say we are in a building phase.

Will internet search continue to be important for InfoSpace? If you look at the breakdown in value of our market (capitalization), which is around $400 million, about half is in cash and half is attributable to our search business. Search is our single biggest business and maybe will be for a long time to come. It’s certainly a business we care about and that’s profitable. It’s great to be in a business like that. At the same time, we have this cash and we will be looking at buying into other businesses. You mix and match what you’ve got.

What is it like leading InfoSpace, which has a lot of baggage from the dot-com era, as an internet high flier that crashed to Earth? I would say that the InfoSpace name is well known, and there’s good and bad elements of that. I’m a big believer in leveraging the brand where possible. We just got back the use of the infospace.com URL, and rather than just use it as a corporate site, we now use it as a search engine. We did that recognizing that InfoSpace is a big brand, and why not leverage that? We launched it with a view to providing a very clean search experience.

I see you once worked for GE and reported directly to Jack Welch. What was that like? Jack Welch was a great executive and I learned a lot working with him. There are plenty of books out there on him, and some are even accurate. He’s very smart and creative. If you want a secondhand Welch tip, he is a student of human incentives. When you get behavior you don’t care for, look at what incentives are in place that drive that behavior.

Are you a Northwest native? I’ve lived all over the country. I grew up on the East Coast and spent many years in the Midwest and Minnesota, and spent many years in California. I’m an outdoors person and it’s really nice to do the outdoors in Seattle.

What do you do outdoors? I’m an endurance athlete, so I do triathlons and marathons, and I like some sports like snowboarding and mountain biking.