Facebook, due to its 400 million status-updating asparagus-farming, link-sharing, party picture-posting denizens, has risen to the top of the Internet heap once again, surpassing — at least according to one ranking, Google, in total U.S. visitors for the third time this year.

Facebook accounted for 7.07% of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending March 13, compare that to 7.03% for Google. Facebook previously bested Google on the weekend of March 6-7, and also on Jan. 1, not to mention Dec. 24-25, 2009.

It is not surprising that Facebook has continued to grow at an astounding clip with its share of visits rising 185% over the same week last year.

Google’s visits, by comparison, grew at a much more sedate 9% rate.

Facebook now claims more than 400 million active users, with more than 60 million status updates each day, three billion photos and five billion Web links, news stories and other pieces of Web content shared each week.

The company’s statistics show that Google’s Reader and News products combined account for about 1.4 of visits to news and media sites, but Facebook accounts for 3.52% of such visits. Overall, Facebook is the No. 4 source of visits to news and media sites.

Facebook’s latest traffic surge is “a potentially significant milestone and speaks to how significant a destination Facebook has become,” says analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. “There’s a much higher level of engagement with Facebook than search, but they’re different animals.”

Never-the-less, that reputation does not mean much if you can’t translate the hits into revenue, and Facebook is clearly behind Google on that score.

Facebook is privately held and does not release revenue figures, but industry blog Inside Facebook estimates the company earned US$700 million in revenue in 2009 and will break the billion mark this year.

On the other hand, Google hauled in $6.67 billion in revenue last year.

It would be a different story if the headlines were screaming that Yahoo or Bing had taken over the lucrative No. 1 search spot on the Internet.

Nielsen data from December shows Google continued to lead the pack in terms of U.S. visits, with nearly 156 million, trailed by Microsoft, Yahoo and then Facebook, with just shy of 110 million.

Whatever the ranking, Facebook will need to continue to evolve its features if it is to continue its meteoric growth and find a way of capitalizing on all of those hits.

Facebook recently extended its deal with Microsoft to use Bing to power Facebook searches, but the implementation so far has been lacking and a better experience is necessary if Facebook wants to make money from paid search ads.

“Facebook’s task is to move beyond being mostly an entertainment and communications site into one that offers more practical utility to end-users…unless or until it does so, it won’t really challenge Google.”