Things might be looking up for Yahoo, which just posted its best quarter since Carol Bartz took the reins a year ago. They earned $153 million (11 cents per share) in Q4—a huge improvement over the same quarter last year, where they saw a loss of $303 million (22 cents per share). And Yahoo might have even done better, if it weren’t for all the internal changes and pending Microsoft partnership.

That may be changing soon. “We are done looking inward,” Bartz told analysts. “We are looking outward at the incredible opportunities ahead.” And this year’s opportunities might even include acquiring other companies. Yahoo also projects that Q1 of this year will be even better YOY, with $1.63B in revenue (which would be lower than Q409, but ain’t that always the way? maybe they held back some of their revenue to report in Q1?).

Of course, it’s not all good news. Revenue for Q409 was down by 4%, coming out at $1.73B (then again, revenue was down 12% YTD, so that’s not so bad, right? And I hear there’s this recession thing going around.). Google’s revenue was up 17%—but a fat lot of good that did their stock. Yahoo’s stock was up 60 cents (3.8%) after their numbers came out.

There have also been some interesting flip-flops in earnings and revenues:

For all of 2009, Yahoo earned $598 million, or 42 cents per share, on revenue of $6.46 billion. That compared with income of $419 million, or 29 cents per share, on revenue of $7.21 billion in 2008.

Perhaps best of all, Yahoo added 700 employees in Q4, though they’re still 1300 below the “recent peak employment” from September 2008.

What do you think? Could things be turning around for Yahoo?