Google has launched a stack of new search features that make up the ground that it’s lost to Twitter as a real time reputation monitoring tool.

Google search and the email alert service Google Alerts enable keywords to be tracked and content to be served from the web once it has been spidered by Google. But it’s very hit and miss: there is no sentiment and its ability to order web pages by publication time and date is limited.

Compare that with Twitter search and the growing slew of reputation monitoring tools that make use of the Twitter KPI such as Twilert and Twendz.

But the fight back has begun via an unremarkable ‘Show options tab’ on the Google search results page. Google has added a timeline feature that enables search results to be ordered by date meaning that you can search results from a finite time period.

You can also look at related Google searches and web sites around a search term using a feature bizarrely named the Wonder Wheel.

There’s more promised. Google has announced that it is set to support microformats meaning that punters can rate web sites when it appears in a search result and hunt down content by sentiment.

Drew Benvie and Paul Bradshaw have both posted on this story.