Google Earns More Popularity Points than Apple

According to the annual survey by online branding magazine brandchannel.com, search engine company Google Inc. has been the No. 1 brand in the world last year, outranking Apple and the newly eBay-acquired Skype VoIP company, a brand that managed to surprise everybody by jumping to third place.

The survey was compiled with the help of some 2,528 branding professionals and students that participated in the study. Still, this seems to be a pretty quiet year for brandchannel.com, as on previous years the results of similar surveys triggered a lot of controversy: in 2004, Arabic TV station Al Jazeera was voted the world's fifth most influential brand (down to 25th place this year).

The question all participants to this survey were asked to answer was: "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2005?" Most of them indicated that Google was the most influential part of it all, which should make the Google staff very happy and proud for releasing so many new services and making them available throughout new territories.

Apple is bound to accept the defeat from the number one search engine and the number one VoIP company out there. Little good did all the products launched last year do to help Apple's stand in this survey.