The Q&A session following Yahoo’s “What Matters Most” event today was interesting. That is, interesting if you’re confused by the whole Bing/Yahoo strategy going forward. And it would certainly be understandable if you were — especially after an event in which Yahoo did a lot to highlight changes to its search product. You know, the one everyone thought Microsoft was now running.

But there’s an important distinction between Yahoo’s plans for its own search product going forward, and Microsoft’s plans for it. The easiest way to think about it is that Yahoo will be in charge of the frontend side of things for Yahoo Search, while Microsoft will be in charge of the backend — though not all of it. And Yahoo didn’t shy away from questions today as to whether that means that essentially, Yahoo is still competing with Microsoft in search? From a frontend perspective, which is all most users will ever see, it is, says Yahoo.

New stats from monitoring service StatCounter suggest that for the second time since its launch, Microsoft’s Bing has surpassed Yahoo Search as the second most used search engine in the United States. Shortly after publicly debuting the new service, Bing already jumped over Yahoo Search – if only for one day – which many attributed to the launch momentum. But Bing has proven to be a very solid product that many seem keen to try out even after a month.

According to the new data, Bing took 12.9% of the US market like comScore had earlier measured. With the strong jump, Bing comes out ahead of Yahoo Search (10.15%), while Mountain View remains the undisputed king of the mountain with a US market share of 75%.

Earlier today, we were at Yahoo’s “End of the 10 Blue Links” event. Basically, it was their state of search gathering, similar to the “Searchology” event that Google had last week. But there was a key difference, as anyone who was following along with the live notes likely saw: Google’s was interesting. Yahoo’s was not.

That’s not necessarily to say that Yahoo isn’t working on anything interesting in search — it is. BOSS, its open search strategy and Search Monkey, its open search application platform, are interesting, but they’re also old. In fact, part of today was used to highlight Search Monkey’s one year anniversary. One year may not seem like a long time, but in a constantly innovating web, especially in the search space, it is. And there’s a much larger problem with those two offerings: They’re not particularly interesting to end users on a large scale.

We’re at OutCast Communication’s offices for a Yahoo Search event that they’ve dubbed “The End of the 10 Blue Links.” It looks to be a state of the union for Yahoo’s search product, and a look ahead.

There’s a clear theme already in this presentation: Search is shifting away from links to intent, according to Yahoo. And it’s moving from just pages to objects. They don’t just want to serve up a series of static results based on a word, but rather want to leverage the data they’re collecting from products like Search Monkey and mobile search to figure out what people are actually looking for.