I remember a time when Yahoo was the king of search. If you wanted to find anything useful in the morass of the web, you turned to the friendly editors at the California-based firm and, likely as not, you’d get what you were looking for.

But then a certain Google went and changed everything and Yahoo has struggled to maintain a foothold ever since.

It still is, by the look of things. Yesterday I attended a Yahoo 2009 preview event, held in modest surroundings in London’s East End, where the firm was showcasing upcoming developments and changes. The key message seemed to be that a) we’re still big in search and b) we’re going to be more ‘open’. In fact I encountered the word ‘open’ in its various forms more than 20 times during the various presentations (I was keeping tally, just in case you were wondering).

This new spirit of openness involves the firm opening up its various APIs so that third parties can develop widgets and ‘applications’ for the various Yahoo services, allowing users to aggregate content from other companies’ web services – yes, even Google’s – and even allowing people to hack into and play with the search engine itself.

Some of the other stuff being demonstrated was pretty interesting. The mobile service – OneConnect – which allows users to aggregate contacts from several different services, including social-networking sites, and the prospect of being able to send IMs or email automatically, depending on whether they’re online is definitely an appealing one.

The search improvements certainly look good – the firm says it is focusing on users’ “intent” when they search rather than simple keywords, offering suggestions as you go and rich media content within the results – with inline YouTube video playback a particularly interesting development.

There are other refinements in the pipeline to its homepage, its popular Answers service and others.

But none of it grabs me as being particularly groundbreaking. Google, as we all know, is already into ‘open’ search in a big way, and its services are much more broad, refined, effective and speedy than Yahoo’s, though its mobile offering has big gaps that need to be filled.

If Yahoo wants to grab back lost ground, it really needs a big announcement, a launch to grab the attention of the general internet-consumer. But as the recent launch of Chrome shows, Google, has the market cornered on this front, too.

Toby Coppel, managing director of Yahoo Europe and Canada, perhaps unwittingly, summed it all up very well in his opening address when he said: “we can’t possibly keep up or have all the best ideas”. Fine, but surely Yahoo can do better than this?