London (UK) - In yet another chapter of an apparently still unfolding Cinderella story, market researchers today said that the ’Google’ is now the world’s most valuable brand. The firm’s name is now valued at about twice the amount of ’IBM’, three times ’Disney’ or five times ’Yahoo’.

If we believe UK-based Millward Brown, the Larry Page and Sergey Brin now can claim to have had an idea for a company whose name is now worth about $66.4 billion, which is about 77% more than the brand’s estimated value in 2006. Within one year, the brand has surpassed long-established brands including Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and General Electric.

The majority of companies listed in Millward Brown’s top 100 "Brandz" has seen a slight upward movement from last year. Winners include Nokia (+19%, $31.7 billion), Hewlett-Packard (+27%, $25.0 billion), Apple (+55%, $24.8 billion), Sony (+22%, $11.4 billion) and Cingular Wireless (+39%, $9.3 billion). On the losing end, Microsoft lost its leading spot not only to Google, but also #2 to General Electric : The Microsoft brand lost about 11% of value last year, according to Millward Brown and now lists for $55.0 billion.

Joining Microsoft are IBM (-7%, $33.6 billion), Cisco (-10%, $18.8 billion), Intel (-26%, $18.7 billion), Dell (-24%, $13.9 billion), Yahoo (-6%, $13.2 billion) and T-Mobile (-32%, $8.0 billion).