It seems that Yahoo hasn’t been particularly impressed with the public perception of its search effort, holding an event to help address some of what it feels to be “misconceptions” around its search business.

Yahoo! Buzz, the other kind of Buzz D:

It’s certainly a curious event, especially given the fact that Yahoo’s deal with Microsoft effectively sees much of Yahoo’s search traffic being handled by Microsoft’s search engine, the still-growing Bing. It’s an interesting situation, but Yahoo seems to be tilting a little, with the left hand seeming unaware of the right hand’s various appointments.

Indeed, the BBC is reporting that Yahoo’s VP of search, Shashi Seth, commented that, despite the impression given by the deal with Microsoft, “Yahoo has been in search, is in search and will continue to be in search … This is the stake we have put in the ground. We will continue to show innovation and drive lots of great features and products into the marketplace and wow our users.”

It’s certainly an interesting case, given the fact that Yahoo’s CEO, Carol Bartz, recently commented of Yahoo’s positioning in the search market that, “We have never been a search company. It is: ‘I am on Yahoo. I am going to do a search.”

It’s an interesting distinction, but one that seems to run counter to Seth’s comment on the current situation with search at Yahoo, and indeed, one that likely sowed many of the “misconceptions” that he had hoped to address at Yahoo’s recent event.

Still, it’ll take some work to get Yahoo back on track after 2009, a year which saw a fairly steady decline in its market share, with the lapsed Yahoo users apparently turning at first to Microsoft’s Bing in the months immediately following its launch and the, towards the end of the year, to Google.