The stock seesaw for Yahoo–fueled this time by a story in The Wall Street Journal that claimed that former AOL CEO Jon Miller was buttonholing private equity firms for money to buy the Internet giant–continues.

Yahoo shares rose seven percent due to the report, to $11.50, up 76 cents.

Unfortunately for everyone but stock manipulators, the Journal story had a lot of problems, including the highly pertinent fact that Miller has not been actively working on such a deal with any more effort that he had been over the last six months.

“Nothing is different now than it was last week, or even months ago,” said one person close to the situation.

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A report in the Times of London in which Microsoft would buy Yahoo’s search business in a convoluted $20 billion deal that would include well-known Internet execs Jon Miller and Ross Levinsohn, is–in the words of one key player–”total fiction.”

Actually, that’s Levinsohn speaking, on the record. But that’s also the essential word from all key players regarding the Times’s report.

While Microsoft has long been interested in doing a search deal with Yahoo, BoomTown has spoken to top sources at Yahoo and Microsoft too and all scoff at such a deal taking place right now or that either side has been in any such discussions of late.

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At least Yahoo got one day of stock euphoria, on the news that its CEO Jerry Yang was stepping down, before Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped yet another bomb on the troubled Internet giant by saying once more with feeling that he is not at all interested in buying it.

Yahoo shares plummeted on the news, dropping below $10 a share to close at $9.14, down $2.41 or an astonishing 21 percent.

While lack of interest in acquiring Yahoo is a sentiment that Ballmer has expressed more times than Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said “maverick” in the presidential campaign, Wall Street continues to hold out hope that Microsoft might swoop in and make a new bid for all of Yahoo.

It will not. Let’s repeat. It. Will. Not.

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Today, Yahoo shares plummeted almost nine percent to close at $10.34, off $1.01, in yet another freefall that has all sorts of disturbing implications for the troubled Internet company.

Yahoo’s market cap is off another billion dollars to $14.3 billion right now, and that has a big impact on everything from its talks to merge with AOL to the morale of its employees to an ability to pull up before it’s too late.

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Could Ross Levinsohn and Jon Miller reinvent Yahoo? What about OpenTable’s Jeff Jordan? Or various and sundry Google or Microsoft execs?

It could happen.

That specific scenario of putting someone like the two former Internet execs in charge of the troubled Web giant is one of the many being bandied about, as Yahoo shares tumble and the company heads toward a potentially ugly annual meeting everyone involved desperately wants to avoid.

In fact, Yahoo’s board and major investors are talking today about various options for the company, including Yahoo’s receptivity to a sweetened deal with Microsoft and also other ways to pull the asset-rich company out of its stock doldrums.

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Apparently, according to Yahoo, Microsoft is as clever and deceptive as the buff and gun-toting Angelina Jolie in the new film “Wanted.”

BoomTown will get to that later. But with Yahoo shares hovering close to $20 a share, Microsoft has certainly got to be thrilled that the sweetened search ad deal it is currently preparing–including forking over about $10 billion for one-third of the company–is getting cheaper by the minute.

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Here’s an email I got from a high-ranking Yahoo employee today after the Microsoft deal was declared dead and the ad-outsourcing deal with Google announced hours later:

“Out of the frying pan, into the fire. At least, the frying pan was a slower death.”

And here’s an email from a major Yahoo investor–no, not Carl Icahn!:

“The Board and Jerry are idiots.”

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