That really depends to a large degree upon what kind of bike you're looking for - and brand alone isn't really going to tell you everything.

A couple examples to illustrate:

Huffy and Sears made, on the whole, very unremarkable bicycles. However, Huffy Team 7-11 bicycles are exceptional, and are very valuable. Sears' Ted Williams bikes are also quite nice.

Raleigh, Schwinn, and Peugeot all made full line-ups of bicycles. The ones at the very top end are very good, the ones at the bottom end - while solidly built, are heavy, sloppily finished, and were made in huge quantities.

I know we've been through the exercise of producing guidelines for assessing the desireability of bicycles a couple times before (at least). Perhaps someone can recall a pertinent thread, and link to it for us here.