The analysts of the Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands by consultants Millward Brown found that the company’s value of $101.4 billion puts it 25 per cent more valuable than computer software king Microsoft at $77.3 billion, reported Daily Mail on Thursday.

Coca Cola ($68.5 billion) managed the third place in the list.

Technology companies make up the bulk of the top 10 with IBM (fourth at $67.5 billion), Apple (sixth at $63.9 billion) and China Mobile (seventh at $62.2 billion), along with consumables like cigarette brand Marlboro (10th at 50.1 billion) and burger chain McDonald’s (fifth at $67.3 billion).

Energy major GE (eight at $59.9 billion) and telecom giant Vodafone (ninth at $50.2 billion) complete the top 10 valuable brands in the world.

Google, formed at Stanford University by studentsLarry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997, went up 16 percent in brand value in the past year to just break the $100 billion mark.

Google marketing manager Lorraine Twohill said: “We know that without consumers you have nothing and there is a great element of trust in us.”

“We think about the consumer first and expect everything else to fall into place after that. We don’t feel big. We still work in little crappy teams and we feel very small,” he added.

Among industries to see their value grow over the past year, most are ’stay at home’ brands, said the Millward Brown research.

Coffee companies like Nescafe benefitted from cutbacks on drinking expensive lattes in Starbucks and other coffee shops, for instance.

Soft drinks, fast food and beer brands also grew as more people stayed at home to eat and drink while online sites like eBay and Amazon also grew.

Car companies, insurers, clothing brands and, not surprisingly, financial institutions were the ones to suffer the most, the research found.

Millward Brown Chief Executive, Joanna Seddon said: “In the current environment, brand has become even more important because it can help to sustain companies in tough times.

“Those who continue to invest in their brand will be better positioned for business growth as the economic situation starts to improve than those who have cut spend. The recession does not always harm individual brands as much as it does faceless corporations,” she added.

Researchers say that since the approach can be scaled down further in size, the new technology is a major step towards a cloak that would work for visible light.John Pendry from Imperial College London first theorized a cloak with a “carpet” design in 2008. One of the research teams describes its miniature “carpet cloak” in the journal Nature Materials.

“This is a huge step forward, a tremendous achievement,” says Professor Ortwin Hess of the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey. “It’s a careful choice of the right materials and the right structuring to get this effect for the first time at these wavelengths.”

Google Trends is a site that tracks the most popular search terms on Google. As I type here the most popular search is “obama budget“. This isn’t exactly new, but some outfits using the web to push malware are using Google Trends to find terms for their sites in order to get them into the searches of the most users possible.

Both Trend and Mcafee were tipped by a recent event in which searches on a Facebook worm called “Error Check System”. The worm was an interesting problem all by itself (the Trend Micro entry talks more about the worm, the Mcafee entry more about the SEO abuse), but what was really interesting is that if you Googled “Error Check System” you were pushed links to malware-infested sites. The recent GMail outage produced a similar problem; Googling “Gmail Down” got you lots of malware.

In all these cases, as with other recent attacks such as the eWEEK attack, the end result was to push rogue anti-malware to the user. This really does seem to the star of the malware world in that it directly brings in money.

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