This is dead on. But it looks like, to some degree, Twitter Search is solving this problem. Twitter is able to do this because, luckily, Twitter has a base of users that are willing to supply the instantaneous news.

As a real-life example, a couple of weeks ago there was a minor earthquake. It was my first time experiencing one so I searched on Google to see what the deal was. I couldn't find anything. Then I turned to Twitter and saw tons of posts coming in about the earthquake.