Apple, the computer company, has toppled Google, the search engine, to be voted "the brand with the most global impact" in a poll run by Interbrand, the branding consultancy giant.

The real surprise, however, was the emergence of al-Jazeera, the controversial Arab television station in a top-five dominated by "shiny", fashion-conscious, western companies.

Apple aficionados are likely to regard the verdict, reached by readers of Interbrand's brandchannel.com website, as overdue. The company, recently described by one fan as having the "attitude of an artist and the eye of an anthropologist", has consistently won plaudits for its sleek, lovingly engineered products and now enjoys commercial success.

"It’s hard to imagine a brand having a shinier year than Apple," said Robin D.Rusch, the editor in chief of Brandchannel.

The phenomenal popularity of the iPod has transformed Apple’s fortunes. Over 10 million of the must have music players have been sold since the product's launch four years ago. Last year they helped achieve a 300 per cent increase in revenues for Apple – more than offsetting its shrinking share of the computer market.

The upstart Google, whose internet search engine inspires similar levels of loyalty, usurped Apple as the most admired brand in 2002, according to the poll. But this year the company, which makes 95 per cent of its revenue from paid-search advertising, could only manage second spot.

The shock result came among the runners up. Following the familiarly western Ikea and Stabucks – deemed the third and fourth most impactful brands of the last year respectively – came al-Jazeera, the controversial Qatar-based television station.

Al-Jazeera, which is funded by Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, the leader of Qater who staged a coup against his father a decade ago, has become renowned for its decisions to air tapes that the western media have considered too bloody or violent to screen.

It has also frequently been the first channel to receive messages from figures on the run from western authorities. The channel last month played a tape purportedly from Osama bin Laden urging Iraqis to boycott the weekend’s parliamentary polls. United States forces bombed the channel’s Baghdad bureau earlier in the Iraq war.

The incendiary style of programming has displeased several disparate groups – the US Defence Department has labelled al-Jazeera "an unbalanced political entity" while many Shias regard the station as a Sunni mouthpiece – but it has changed the media landscape of Middle East.

In the nine years since al-Jazeera began broadcasting it has been joined by more than half a dozen Arab competitors, leading commentators to observe that having been unable to strangle the station, other Arab states have been forced to emulate it.

Compared with 2003, al-Jazeera climbed eight places to reach the fifth spot in the global survey.

Mr Rusch said: "Al-Jazeera presents an alternative point of view to those who until recently have had only CNN or the BBC to supply ‘world’ news views."

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