Well, friends, sound the wedding bells: The longest-running courtship in the history of mankind has finally reached its climax. No July Fools' joke here -- Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to tie the knot and form a search partnership. (Yes, that same partnership we've been hearing about since way back when.) The agreement will effectively send Yahoo's own search technology to the grave, giving that thing called Bing access to an extra 9 percent of the overall market.

But Yahoo itself isn't going away; in fact, from a user perspective, you might not even notice much difference. So what's the real deal with the deal, then? Here are some answers.

More: http://pcworld.com/article/169288/