The world’s favourite internet search engine, Google, has joined the corporate super-league with a market value which ranks among America’s top five companies.

Just a decade after its creation in a Stanford University dormitory, the Silicon Valley firm’s capitalisation reached $219bn on Tuesday - overtaking healthcare titan Proctor & Gamble to place it fifth on the US stockmarket.

Only ExxonMobil, General Electric, Microsoft and the telecoms company AT&T are larger than Google.

Its shares powered past yet another milestone today as they touched $700 for the first time, less than a month after reaching the $600 mark. By mid-morning in New York, they were up $5.27 to $700.04.

Google’s growth spurt has been driven by seemingly unstoppable profits - the company’s recent third-quarter earnings showed a 46% leap in net income to $1.07bn. Experts cite its leadership in online maps, videos, news and finance - all of which are considered so far “under-monetised” but are thought to offer huge potential for advertising-driven revenue.

Todd Greenwald, an analyst at Nollenberger Capital in San Francisco, said: “Could they be bigger? Certainly. Frankly, the market’s only just realising the vast amount of earnings power and is valuing Google appropriately.”

The soaring share price means Google’s two 34-year-old founders - Sergey Brin and Larry Page - have paper fortunes of more than $20bn each.

The pair only take salaries of $1 a year but receive more than $1m in annual bonuses. They have shown a taste for jetset living - they have refurbished a former Qantas Airways 180-passenger Boeing 767 as a “party plane” with twin staterooms, a dining room and showers and have won permission to keep it at a usually restricted Nasa base in California. Google is 10 times as valuable as America’s biggest carmaker, General Motors, and is worth 30% more than the world’s largest drugs firm, Pfizer. Long established “old economy” brands pale into comparison - Coca-Cola’s capitalisation is just $142bn, while McDonald’s can only command a value of $70bn.

Most industry followers believe that the only way is up for Google. The information service Bloomberg reported that out of 37 analysts tracking the company, 33 recommend buying the shares and the other four rate the stock as a “hold”.

Google accounts for 56% of all searches on the internet according to the online research firm Comscore. In Britain, Google is visited more than any other website with 28.6 million unique users in September - reaching 89% of all UK internet users.

Long-term critics of Google question the company’s cost control - its payroll has grown rapidly to 16,000 - and point to litigation from broadcasters over alleged rampant copyright abuse at Google’s YouTube arm. But Mark May, an internet analyst at Needham & Company, wrote in a recent note: “We continue to view Google as a core holding and believe the company’s strong brand loyalty, the business’s substantial free cashflow potential and the team’s track record of innovation will lead to further gains.”

Google is shortly expected to reveal plans for a mobile phone to take on hi-tech competitors such as Apple’s iPhone. The Google-powered phone is intended to make it easier to access the company’s most popular features through a handset - including YouTube, maps and Gmail email.

Competitors have struggled to keep up. Yahoo!, which ranks second among internet searches, has lost ground and recently parted company with its chief executive amid criticism over its drifting strategy.

The Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has accused Gordon Brown of deliberately undermining the Darfur peace talks and demanded a public apology, after the prime minister threatened new sanctions against Sudan if the talks failed.

Mr Brown’s remarks amounted to direct encouragement for Darfur’s rebels to continue fighting and to boycott the negotiations that started in Libya at the weekend, Mr Bashir told the Guardian.

“We read it as encouraging these people, the movements, ‘Make these talks fail so that we will be able to punish the government of Sudan’,” he said.

The Sudanese government sent a large delegation to the talks and announced a unilateral ceasefire on the opening day.

But Darfur’s main armed groups have refused to attend the talks, which were meant to end five years of war that have left 2 million people homeless and caused up to 200,000 deaths.

Mediators from the United Nations and the African Union plan to meet the various rebel leaders in their exile headquarters outside Sudan as well as in Darfur. They hope to prevent the talks from collapsing, as an earlier effort did last year.

In an exclusive interview in the presidential residence, the first he has given any western reporter this year, Mr Bashir made it clear where he thought blame for failure would lie. “It will be the responsibility of the external interventions, particularly from Britain, France and the United States,” he said.

His anger was prompted by comments that Mr Brown made to reporters in Britain on Sunday, the day after the peace talks started in Colonel Muammar Gadafy’s home town of Sirte. The Libyan leader is hosting the talks but has no role as a mediator.

“This is a critical and decisive moment for Darfur,” Mr Brown said. Although he praised Sudan for announcing a ceasefire, and called on all parties to join it, he singled out the government of Sudan for possible punishment. “Of course, if parties do not come to the ceasefire, there’s a possibility we will impose further sanctions on the government,” he said.

Michael O’Neill, Britain’s special envoy on Sudan, read out an amended statement in the prime minister’s name in Sirte later the same day. “We stand ready to take tough action with our partners against any party that obstructs progress including new sanctions,” it said.

But Mr Bashir has chosen to treat Mr Brown’s choice of words as deliberate. The Sudanese foreign ministry summoned Rosalind Marsden, the British ambassador to Khartoum, to protest.

Mr Bashir went further by demanding a public apology. He shook his head vigorously when it was put to him that there might have been a misunderstanding.

“We very well read and understand English”, he replied. “There was no misunderstanding at all. The statement was very clear.”

The president listened to the questions without having them translated into Arabic, but answered through an interpreter.

He said the Darfur issue would have been solved by now if there had not been a constant pattern of external intervention, stretching back to long before Mr Brown’s weekend statement.

“What we suffer here and in Darfur in particular, and the problems in Sudan in general, are caused by these three powers, Britain, France and the United States,” he said. The three countries continually adopted resolutions at the UN to punish Sudan, he added.

Sudan has come under fire from the three countries in the UN security council for being primarily responsible for the activities of government forces and janjaweed militia in burning villages, raping women and driving hundreds of thousands of people into camps for the displaced in 2003 and 2004.

They also accuse it of creating obstacles for the new UN/AU peace force and for UN aid agencies and other humanitarian workers, as well as rejecting demands to punish officials suspected of crimes against humanity or to hand them to the international criminal court.

The UN has imposed some sanctions, while the US enforces its own tougher ones.

But Mr Bashir insisted the roots of the problem in Darfur lay in desertification, which left nomads and farmers struggling over diminishing natural resources.

There was also banditry. People took up arms for various reasons, including tribal disputes. But external intervention “sharpened the appetite of some of the commanders and leaders to look for positions and get part of this cake”, he said.

A peacekeeping force run by the AU and the UN is due to start operating in Darfur in January. Western governments have been pressing for its 26,000 troops and police to include some non-African contingents, partly to ensure it is more robust than the smaller all-African force now deployed in Darfur. Thailand has offered 800 troops. Nepal is also offering some.

Mr Bashir told the Guardian this was unnecessary. “What is required in Darfur now is eight battalions. The contribution submitted so far by African countries is sixteen battalions … So Africa is producing 200% of our requirements … We will never accept any forces from outside Africa until we are convinced that Africa has failed to contribute the required forces”, he declared.

A Downing Street spokesman said Mark Malloch Brown, the minister for Africa, had telephoned Nafi Ali Nafi, the chief Sudanese negotiator in Libya, on Sunday to explain that the prime minister had meant to say sanctions might be imposed on the Darfurian rebels as well as on the government.

“The prime minister’s written statement is on the website”, the spokesman said. “It covers any omission in his earlier oral statement. We’ve accepted there was an omission. We’re aware it’s caused some offence.”

Police are hunting a suspect who set off up to 200 fireworks in a Bolton shop, injuring a 15-month-old boy.

The man, wearing a Scream-type mask, threw a box containing a lit industrial firework onto the floor of the convenience store before running off.

The firework set off scores of small rockets that flew around the shop spewing coloured smoke and sparks at about 9.30pm on Monday.

The shopkeeper managed to kick the firework into the shop porch where it continued to explode.

The man was unhurt but his 15-month-old son was taken to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation.

Police believe the firework was a Fantasia 218. Officers want to hear from any retailers who may have sold it.

“This was one of the worst incidents I have ever seen of someone abusing a lit firework and endangering lives,” said Inspector Tony Kenyon.

“This was not a small firework. It could be described as an industrial-style firework with up to 200 repeat rounds so the risk of endangering life was very high.

“It was a very dangerous prank and resulted in a young baby having to go to hospital. Thankfully the injuries were not severe but it could have been tragic.”

The incident happened at the California Wines shop on Tonge Moor Road, Bolton, Greater Manchester.