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We already knew that Facebook had usurped Yahoo's spot as the Web's second-most visited website in the U.S. in January, but today, Web analytics firm Compete also released its data for the rest of the top 50 sites in in the U.S. Unsurprisingly, most shopping sites registered a large drop in unique visitors since December, while tax services are seeing some of the highest month-to-month growth rates.

Your phone can translate foreign language text just by looking at it through Google Goggles. A South Korean telecom has released a product similar to Google Goggles. The social content Augmented Reality mobile browser junaio will have a new version released at SXSW next month and there's now an 8 minute video from TED available detailing Microsoft's plans for Bing, including Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality (AR), the practice of displaying data on top of our view of the world around us, is hot stuff. Below are the top stories on AR from around the web over the past 24 hours, selected with help from OneSpot. Watch this space: ReadWriteWeb will be releasing a research report on the use of AR for marketing very soon.

The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice just cleared the proposed search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo. Under the terms of this deal, Microsoft's Bing will soon replace Yahoo's own search engine on Yahoo's sites, while Microsoft will get an exclusive 10-year license to Yahoo's search technology. Yahoo will receive 88% of all the revenues from search ads on its site for the first five years of the agreement and handle the sales for Microsoft's and Yahoo's premium search advertising inventory.

As we've seen from some of the previews of the new layout, search is becoming more of a focal point for Facebook, and today's announcement seems to back that up. Microsoft and Facebook announced this morning an expanded partnership, making Bing the default search engine for Facebook's more than 400 million users worldwide.

The two companies also came to a "mutual decision" to allow Facebook to take over sole responsibility for advertisements on the social network, a move that we see as part of Facebook's continual progression toward becoming an ad provider.

Apparently Microsoft is talking profit in the midst of 15 straight quarters of losses, according to a Paid Content article this morning. The company is looking to Bing to pull it out of its nearly four-year long slide, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft senior vice president of online business, said in an interview last night with Reuters.

According to the interview, Bing is looking at becoming a "credible No. 2" as soon as Microsoft closes a deal with Yahoo, making Bing the backbone for Yahoo search. We do see a few areas where Bing has been gaining ground and wonder if Microsoft may be able to come back out of the red.

A week ago, the cat was let out of the bag: Apple and Microsoft were in talks over replacing Google with Bing, and have been for weeks, as the default search engine on the iPhone. Immediately, there were questions over the implications of this move, both for the companies involved and the users.

Today, online advertising network Chitika has released some numbers that show just how big of a move this could be for all parties involved.

Microsoft just announced that it is taking the Bing Maps Sliverlight version out of beta and making it the default version for Bing Maps. The Bing Team is rolling this change out slowly. Within a few weeks, all users in the U.S. will see the Silverlight maps by default. The AJAX site will continue to work for the time being and users will be able to switch back and forth between the two version. The Silverlight version is a major step forward for Bing Maps and, in many respects, puts it ahead of Google Maps in terms of features and usability.

Google still dominates the search market in in the U.S., while Bing, Yahoo and Ask lost a small slice of the market in December. According to the latest data from Hitwise, Google's market share continues to hover around 72%. Yahoo now owns 14.83% of the search market and Bing accounted for 8.92% of all U.S. searches. Hitwise also looked at the success rates for the top search engines. Hitwise defines this as "the percentage of executed searches that result in a visit to a site other than a main search domain." Here, Bing used to trail Yahoo and Google by a significant margin, but is now on par with Google.

According to a report by Business Week's Spencer E. Ante, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company about $25 million - enough to turn Twitter into a profitable business in 2009. According to these reports - which Twitter did not comment on - the deal with Google made Twitter about $15 million this year and a similar deal with Microsoft generated about $10 million in revenue.

In our yearly wrap-ups of the best products of 2009, we cannot but notice the shadow that falls over the editorial desk.

We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year - the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009.

Google unveiled its real-time search interface today and it looks much, much better than what rivals Yahoo and Bing have done so far. The new Google real-time search functionality will appear on selected search results pages, below News results, above or below top ranking natural search results - sometimes just above the fold of the page.

The new type of results are well-integrated, unobtrusive, diverse in contents and formatted simply. It appears to be a job very well done. It's hard to believe that neither Yahoo nor Bing have created an experience anywhere near as compelling.

According to an announcement on the Official Google Blog, the search engine giant is rolling out a new format for their universal image results. Set to go live over the next 24 hours, the updated format will now feature one larger image alongside multiple smaller images. Because of this new layout, you'll be able to see "more pictures than before," writes Google Software Engineer Alex Petcherski in the blog post.

Every year at ReadWriteWeb, we look at hundreds of new web apps aimed at everyday users. Occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web.

Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009. These are apps and services that helped consumers use the web in new ways this year; and brought technologies that were previously only geared towards advanced users to a mainstream audience.

As the year draws to an end, all the large search engines have now published their year-end roundups of the most popular search queries on their sites. On almost every service, these include Michael Jackson, Twitter, Lady Gaga and terms related to Twilight. Google also just released its annual Zeitgeist survey, which features lists of the fastest rising search terms on Google's properties worldwide. Among the top queries related to technology and the Web, Facebook (#2) leads the charge ahead of Twitter (#4) and Windows 7 (#8) in the global survey. In the US, Twitter was the fastest rising search term of 2009, followed by Michael Jackson, Facebook, Hulu and hi5.

When Bing debuted a feature called Cashback, the product was intended to save users money while they shopped from online retailers.

As we told you last month when discussing the program's early successes, Cashback works by giving users a certain amount of money back every time they search for an item and then buy it from a participating store. But some users have found the opposite to be true: Retailer cookies trigger jacked-up prices for some items, causing a phenomenon one man calls "negative cashback." How much do Bing users stand to lose? Read on, and brace yourselves.

Google just announced that it now uses public data from the World Bank to display graphs for queries like "children per woman in brazil" or "internet users in the united states." To do so, Google makes uses of the World Bank's public API. Through this, Google can access 17 World Development Indicators. Google displays this data in interactive graphs that make it easy to compare stats for different countries. The timing of this announcement was likely planned to coincide with the news about Wolfram Alpha's integration with Microsoft's Bing.

Microsoft's Bing now relies on Wolfram Alpha to answer some of its users' questions. This is not a full integration of Wolfram Alpha into Bing, though. Instead, Bing only gets answers for queries about nutrition and math problems from Alpha. A query for "french fries" will still result in the standard search results page with a list of links, but a new compute tab in the left sidebar will open up results from Wolfram Alpha. Bing now also uses Alpha to compute queries related to Body Mass Index (BMI). In addition to this Wolfram Alpha integration, Bing now also features improved hover previews with Facebook integration and full page weather results.

Microsoft just released a major update to Bing Maps. Bing Maps now offers draggable routes that are computed dynamically, a zoom bar, embeddable maps, smarter command parsing and a redesigned interface. The new version of Bing Maps also loads faster. Microsoft now hosts the service in 7 data centers around the world and the Bing team has brought the size of the default Bing Maps home page down from 678kb to 484kb. Just like Google Maps, Bing Maps now also understands more complex queries like "Bellevue, WA to Space Needle."

Microsoft just updated Bing's mobile interface. The new interface features tabs and is optimized for high-resolution touch-screen devices like the iPhone or Microsoft's own Zune HD. The earlier version of Bing Mobile worked reasonably well, but the interface was rather generic. The new version, on the other hand, makes good use of the iPhone's touch screen when searching for movies, for example. Bing now shows a list of movie posters that you can scroll through with a sideways swipe.

Social search was in the news this past week when Google and Bing announced that they would be getting access to the Twitter fire hose. A flurry of subsequent posts speculated on what this "social search" would entail, and some expressed concerns over privacy and spam.

But social search is not something to be afraid of. It's really just an extension of behaviors that we're used to in the real world, brought online, thanks to the advent of real-time social computing.