LONDON (Reuters) - Minimalist Internet search engine Google (news - external web site) was voted "brand of the year" by branding junkies on Tuesday, proving once again that less is more as it pipped giants such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks to the top slot.
Google, the powerful search tool that presents Net surfers with a minimum of visual clutter, came top in a global poll of 1,315 respondents to a survey by Interbrand, the leading British branding agency.
The respondents, who were described as "above averagely intelligent" professionals and students from over 72 countries, were asked which brand had made the most impact on their lives in 2002, either positively or negatively.
Mountain View, California-based Google, a privately owned company founded in 1998, won 15 percent of the vote.
Google was lauded for its reluctance to follow competitors such as MSN and Yahoo down the road of providing a more comprehensive -- and by extension more cluttered -- Web interface.
"Started by a couple of techies, Google is kind enough to hide its high-tech interior from the public and give us nothing but a friendly, easy to use, clear, clean exterior," Interbrand's Robin Rusch said.
The search engine has achieved something like cult status even among the more geeky cabals of Net-heads, giving rise to neologisms such as "to Google" -- whose meaning is obvious -- and even the game of "Googlewhacking," in which surfers combine two unrelated words in the search box and try to come up with just one hit.
Perhaps the fact that Interbrand's survey was hosted on the Internet had something to do with the results. Certainly, Apple Computer Inc., whose brand placed second, has more than its fair share of avid surfers.
Apple has a global market share in PCs, and consequently in operating systems, of less than three percent worldwide, but it remains a strong player in the creative industries as well as advertising and media.
"(Apple's) steady array of new product releases and cheeky David-to-Goliath positioning makes it hard not to notice and perhaps explains why our readers tend to favor it," Rusch said.
Apple polled 14 percent of the vote and, surprisingly perhaps, beat what is unquestionably the world's biggest and most successful brand -- the mighty Coca-Cola -- into third place at 12 percent. Ubiquitous coffee shop chain Starbucks and Swedish furnishings store Ikea came in at fourth and fifth place respectively.
