Even as its deal with Microsoft continues to draw towards a conclusion, Yahoo is apparently working on some significant upgrades in terms of search.  Indeed, Carol Bartz was quite adamant during her presentation at Yahoo Investor Day 2010 that her company will remain a contender in this field.

At one point, Bartz encouraged members of the media, "Please do not print that we are out of the search business!  We are in the search business!"

To drive the point home, Bartz also promised a search update in October, and dropped a little bit of a hint concerning what will change.  According to Nicholas Carlson, she said, "Lately, while search has gotten so pretty . . . video, slideshows, images . . .we kind of got behind on that part.  You're going to see a lot more pretty search from us."

And whether or not that's specific enough for you, investors seem to have been impressed by these promises.  Yahoo's stock is up 2.22 percent at the moment, while Google's up just 0.95 percent, the Nasdaq's up only 0.48 percent, and Microsoft's actually down 2.99 percent.

Stay tuned, and we'll see what sort of update Yahoo unveils in October, then.