To American consumers, Google is a hero and Halliburton is a zero.

Or so concludes Harris Interactive in its latest annual Reputation Quotient survey, which polled thousands of Americans to determine the reputations of the 60 most visible companies in America—for better or for worse.

The survey is now in its ninth year, and this time around the headlining change is that Google beat out Microsoft as 2007's best reputed brand, which in turn last year pushed Johnson & Johnson out of the top spot it had held for all seven years of the survey.

This year marked greater-than-usual movement in reputation changes overall: Of the 52 companies measured both this year and last, 15 moved up or down. That's more change than in the previous four years combined.

Robert Fronk, a Harris Interactive senior vice president and senior consultant, hypothesizes that volatility in the survey may have to do with the changing ways in which consumer get their business news.

"The large number of companies that experienced significant change in one year might provide some evidence that the increase in online media, blogs, and social networking may lead to a less-glacial pace of impacting corporate reputation," Fronk said.

Rounding out the survey's top five brands were Johnson & Johnson, Intel, General Mills, and Kraft Foods, the last of which puzzlingly appeared on the list for the first time this year and managed the No. 5 spot. Equally puzzlingly, Microsoft fell in one year all the way from No. 1 to No. 10.

Halliburton is the least-respected company on the list of 60 businesses, preceded by Altria Group, Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron Texaco, Exxon Mobil, and Citgo.

Still, those companies can take some comfort in the fact that Harris Interactive's survey is just one of several studies that attempt to rank companies and brands.

There's also Interbrand's annual ranking of the top-100 global brands, which examines brand strength by modeling future earnings rather than soliciting survey data.

Then there's Brandweek's annual Superbrand Ranking, which tries to determine which brands are most visible by comparing how much they spend annually on advertising.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index, which the University of Michigan has published since 1994, interviews about 80,000 Americans annually and asks about their satisfaction with the goods and services they have consumed.

Harris Interactive's study involves a two-step process that begins with interviews with more than 7,000 people in the U.S. to identify the most visible companies. The second part of the study assesses the reputations of the most visible 60 companies, and this year included 20,477 online interviews.

Harris Interactive asks participants to rate a company's reputation on six dimensions: emotional appeal, products and services, social responsibility, vision and leadership, workplace environment, and financial performance.

So, the results serve as a window into which companies are foremost on Americans' minds, and how positively they view them.