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.

Yeah, it’s confusing.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo’s Senior VP of Labs and Search Strategy, tried to answer the questions as best he could. But the vibe seemed to be that he felt confined in giving the answers that Yahoo is making all of its execs give. And even though at least half of the questions during the Q&A session were about Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft, it was clear that plenty of the journalists and bloggers in the audience still weren’t entirely clear what the plan is. Or that Yahoo really knows what the plan is.

“We are not a version of Bing. We are the Yahoo search experience,” Raghavan said at one point. And he continued on that it was a complex deal, and not as easy to explain or execute as a straight-up acquisition would be. I’ll say.

While Yahoo is full of PR-ready answers that seem to confuse even them, here’s how I interpreted what Yahoo was basically saying today: “We are Yahoo Search, powered by Bing, but we don’t want you to know we’re powered by Bing.”

Elisa Steele, Chief Marketing Officer of Yahoo, wanted to make it clear that the Yahoo branding would remain intact on all Yahoo Search pages. Okay, and that’s fine, as I said, most users will have no idea what is actually powering their search results. But it’s a little odd that Yahoo Search now sounds more like a search layer of sorts over Bing (though, again, they would never put it that way).

And it’s too bad. After the last event which focused on their search innovation (before the Microsoft deal), I was harsh in my criticism of Yahoo, saying that they weren’t doing enough on the frontend to ever take users away from Google. At today’s event, a new frontend is exactly what they showed off, and some of it looks very good. The people-search aspect in particular strikes me as something I would use, as soon as it gets a way to filter things like tweets by most recent updates — which it’s getting, I’m told.

The left-side filters work well as an obvious visual way to scour various popular services that Yahoo has included. We currently use Yahoo BOSS to power TechCrunch search, it was impressive that when I did a search for my name, one of the options was to see all the TechCrunch articles by me.

Certainly it’s in Yahoo’s interest to get people using Yahoo more, but it is too bad that the main benefactor of all the work Yahoo has been doing to make the frontend of its search more compelling may be Microsoft. I wonder if in a year’s time we won’t just consider Yahoo Search to be the prettier version of Bing.

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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%.

StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen comments on the leapfrogging of Yahoo Search by Bing, saying: “The jump in Bing’s share may reflect a positive review of the search engine compared to Google which appeared online in the New York Times on the 8th and in the print version on the 9th July.” I’m not really sure if that is in fact the reason and if this isn’t just the service’s regular growth path. After all, Microsoft has shown a remarkable drive to keep the momentum for its decision engine going, recently adding Twitter messages to search results and bringing the search platform to its Hotmail service. Surely one newspaper article can’t be the only reason for its steady rise in share?

In any event, while Google shouldn’t be particularly worried about losing its dominance on the search market yet, the other players in the field better be watching Bing’s progress very closely. Microsoft is doing it right, and users are noticing, too.

Update: as a commenter points out, judging by the graph Yahoo Search is holding quite steady while Google seems to mirror Bing’s market share evolution. Check it out:

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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.

I bring that up because Yahoo is still losing search share. As it slips closer to 20 percent in the U.S., Google keeps gaining share, up to 64.2% in April, according to comScore. I don’t want to say that there is no way for Yahoo to reverse that trend, but with the things it’s currently doing, I see no way it can. Even if (and probably “when”) it does merge its search business with Microsoft’s search business, the two combined will only have about 28% of the search market in the U.S. — well below half of Google’s share.

So what the hell is Yahoo doing? Well I can tell you what they’re not doing. They’re not focusing on launching sexy-looking new ways to interpret search data on the front end, like Google is. At today’s event, Yahoo did show off some new ways of displaying search results that are being bucket-tested. But when question after question kept asking when those would launch, Yahoo kept basically saying “when they’re ready.” And, to be honest, they were really nothing to write home about anyway.

Yahoo is using its BOSS and Search Monkey products to gather up new data for better results, but none of it is likely as interesting as Google say, trying to index the world’s books.

Here’s what else Yahoo is not doing: Focusing on real-time search. I asked a question about their thoughts on that sexy trend right now, and the various execs at the event all downplayed its importance — calling it a “buzzword.” On some levels they’re right, many real-time search queries like certain results on Twitter search are basically meaningless. But there is an underlying power to real-time search that is undeniable, and that users want. That’s why we’re seeing so many companies working on it right now.

Google recognizes the trend, and is starting to talk about it very seriously. And Twitter is going the other way to add link crawling to its results, to make its real-time search offering much more robust. Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy did say that Yahoo would like to “blend the best of both” meaning mix fresh content with relevant content, but offered no firm plans as to what the company was working on to do that, beyond what it’s already doing — which isn’t enough.

Here’s what Yahoo is doing with its search product based on what they were saying at today’s event: They’re moving from returning links to returning objects based on user intent. But come on, even after we parse the buzzwords (interesting, when you consider that Yahoo called real-time search a buzzword), there’s still not much there. This is the same thing that basically all the search engines have been saying for years now. The web is about more than just links — shocking.

While a new search engine like Wolfram Alpha is actually taking a different approach to search, Yahoo is just trying to display things in a different way to users. They’re saying they’re going to display “objects” rather than links, but that just means they’ll show pictures, movie show times and other slightly more useful cousins of web links in results. Google does that too. So does Microsoft. So does Ask. So does AOL.

You can call it whatever you want: Objects, rich results, pretty picture things — this alone is not a way Yahoo is going to reverse its search share trend. At some point Google will stop taking search share from its competitors (at the very least when it reaches 100%), but Google is synonymous with web search right now, and that is not going to change anytime soon. Especially when Google’s innovations in the space trump Yahoo’s.

Yahoo search may have a window with its mobile offerings — and it played that up today by saying that while about 1 billion people in the world use PCs, 4 billion people use cellphones. But that’s almost more contingent on worldwide mobile carrier deals that any kind of real innovation. Can Yahoo wheel and deal and own that space? We’ll see, but again Google is doing some kick-ass things in mobile search with its voice search technology.

Yahoo can downplay something like real-time search, but at least that’s something different than being the “other Google.” Sadly, with its search product, that’s what Yahoo has become.

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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.

None of this is hardly a new idea, but Yahoo feels it can do the best job of it as it’s been working on many of these technologies for a while now. And with products like BOSS gaining big usage (over 30 million queries a day now), there’s a lot of data coming in.

Below find my live notes:

Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Labs and Yahoo! Search Strategy

• It’s time to kill the 10 blue links.
• Take the insight from mobile search and take it back to the web.
• Figure out the underlying intent of the user.
• We need to move from a web of pages to a web of objects.
• It goes from how many pages we index to how complete of a picture do we make.
• We need to build a web of objects from a web of pages.
• We need to use the wisdom of the crowds — it’s not just about machine algorithms, but the people who gives us information through Search Monkey.
• BOSS is another important part — open up the search engine structure for other players to use it.
• Query volume of BOSS been growing fast, past 30 million now.
• Microsoft’s offering is doing 40 million queries a day, BOSS is hovering around 30 million already

Larry Cornett, Vice President of Consumer Products

• Understanding user intent, creating open search ecosystem and mobile
• Let’s talk about intent: Users have goals that go way beyond a search page: 1) Intent around keywords 2) Intent around objects 3) Intent within time
• In July 2007 we kicked off some of our new initiatives (search suggestions), launched way before competitors followed suit
• The drop-down menu when you do a query, this does query-completion and explore related concepts.
• Rolled this concept out to image searching as well. But image searches are done visually, so we include pictures in there.
• All of this is available through the BOSS API
• Currently in testing: Search for “Paris” and get images of Eiffel Tower. Bring in objects from the real world.
• Also in testing: Recognize an object in the real-world and figure out what they’re looking for — again, all about intent.
• The final dimension: Time. Search Pad is the product we’ve been using to do research. People don’t recognize that they’re doing the same query every night for 6 months. Search Pad is being bucket tested.
• There is intent being expressed over time. “iPod” is different from “iPod fix”
• Get music to play right on page, and music videos to play right on search page — old stuff, Yahoo just patting itself on the back.
• 1st anniversary of Search Monkey.
• In 23 markets around the world. 70 million enhanced results viewed everyday
• 15% increase in click-through rates for some partners
• 15,000 developers using it
• 400 applications in the gallery
• Increase in structured data 413% since we launched
• It’s completely open-standards compliant

Alex Moskalyuk, software engineer for Facebook — Yahoo Search Monkey partner

• Building a Search Monkey app was a valid project for us
• People want to see a user’s picture and their bio information — we can also display the geo information
• Facebook had to create a special URL schema for profiles to work with Search Monkey
• They also had to format pages in hCard microformat

Matthew Hertz from pipl.com — BOSS partner

• Pipl started in 2004, public beta since early 2007 — People search engine – we covered them here.
• We’re good at deep web, but we needed surface web data — that’s where BOSS came in
• Also use BOSS for spam detection and algorithm screening

Marc Davis, chief scientist Yahoo Mobile

• 4 billion people have a mobile device around the world – we’re looking at a world that people use mobile to meet fundamental needs
• Another Star Trek example, it needs to be real easy to figure out what you’re looking for especially on mobile.
• We’re talking to a web of objects that can be connected to by people
• Answers, not just links — with a minimal amount of clicks as possible
• Understanding user context — these 4 billion phones know a lot about you already, now we just need to connect that with results
• Showing off oneSearch — oneSearch shortcut, etc. Search assist is a “lifesaver” on mobile.
• 1 billion PC users versus 4 billion mobile users worldwide — not all Internet users yet, but will be soon
• In Indonesia, mobile search volume is about 4 times greater than PC search. Emerging market growth is juge
• 70 partnerships in 40 countries.
• This is not about one phone (*cough* iPhone *cough*)

Summary and What’s Next?

• Ending the 10 blue link legacy to move to user intent
• Creating experiences from objects and their relationship with the world (rather than just pages)
• Leading the industry with an open foundation for innovation

Q&A Session

• Interfaces in testing — when will we see them? We learn from these bucket tests — if they test well they can launch in the coming months.
• How does a web of objects change the way you serve ads? It doesn’t really change it, but web of objects can help with intent which helps with advertisers.
• Why is this different form what competitors are doing? Eventually users don’t want to read documents, so we want to surface the web objects. A non-answer
• When would it be appropriate to show a page or a link in this object world? Every users won’t want the same thing, so we need to better tailor to cert
• Real time question — the sexy thing? — A bit of a buzz word. Need to separate that word from just Twitter. There’s much more to real-time. Product plans: there is definitely an information need fulfilled by real-time, but they’re saying just something right now. Don’t sacrifice relevance. We’re investing in being able to discover fresh content as fast as possible. Find the freshest content we can and show it. Blend the best of both
• Yahoo Answers, how to use that in search? We should use both and figure out what people are looking for.
• Microsoft new search product with these qualities? For us, if something isn’t testing well, we’re not going to launch it, not based on what others are doing.
• Privacy? It’s opt-in, we don’t have to save the results.
• BOSS model has changed right? Open monetization was launched earlier this year.
• How accurate is intent? Search assist helps with that.
• Tech behind bucket testing things? Our technology plus information we gather from Search Monkey, etc.
• What constitutes an object? Anything in the real-world.
• How do you group objects together? We don’t insist on things being tagged, but there is a lot of data out there to tie things together. And there is value in curation.
• Is it fair to call this semantic search? Yes, that’s fair — at least somewhat. But this goes far beyond static pages and documents. Connect the web of documents to the web of the world.
• Moving from BlackBerry to iPhone? We’re on a thousand different devices globally — we love the mobile web. On a BlackBerry I use Yahoo oneSearch the client. We’re focusing on where we see consumers going — so in going where consumers go.

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A custom search engine can be created that searches just a few defined sites, and/or the entire Yahoo search index and Yahoo News. The search engine can be further tailored to include a specific search term along with whatever the user types in, exclude certain keywords, etc. Once completed, the search engine can be integrated directly into a website via a code snippet.

This is directly competitive with Rollyo (see our posts here) and Eurekster’s Swicki product (see our posts here), which we use for search on TechCrunch – see right sidebar.

Like Eurekster, Yahoo is giving search engine creators the ability to personalize the results page, view search statistics and include a tag cloud of commonly searched terms (this tag cloud greatly increased use of the search engine). Yahoo is saying nothing about sharing advertising revenue with creators – Eurekster is doing this now.