Google Is Still the Fourth Most Valuable Brand in the World

Google has been deemed the fourth most valuable brand in the world, by Interbrand’s Best Global Brands 2011 report, the same position it held last year. That's said, its perceived brand value grew by 27 percent in the last year, just not enough to topple the number three, Microsoft.

Google's rival in a number of markets, Microsoft has managed to hang on to its position, even though it lost a bit of its value in 2011.

Google's brand name is valued at $55.3 billion, €43.7 billion, up from $43.5 billion, €34.4 billion last year. Microsoft's brand, on the other hand, dropped slightly from $60.9 billion, €48.1 billion in 2010 to $59.1 billion, €46.7 billion this year. If Google continues its climb, it will overtake Microsoft next year.

But Google is off to a rough start and the increasing amount of government scrutiny, privacy issues and so on may start to erode the Google brand, if the company doesn't step up to do damage control quite categorically.

The top brands in the world remain Coca Cola and IBM. In fact, in the entire top 10, the only mover is Apple which jumped nine places to end up at number 8, by adding 58 percent to its brand value last year alone.

Interestingly enough, it took the place of Nokia which dropped six places, losing 15 percent of its brand value.

The next company by brand value in the Internet Services category, to which Google belongs, is Amazon.com which jumped 32 percent this year moving 10 places all the way up to the 26th position.

Ebay is the third in the category, the 36th globally, by brand value. Finally, the only other brand in the category to make in the top 100 is Yahoo, which lost 11 percent of its value dropping 10 places to 76.