That was the search for Steve Fossett. There were special efforts made to get the freshest data and specially link it to the search area within hours of a satellite pass. This was a special situation. GE is not by any means real time. (for instance, is there snow on the ground when you look at Atlanta with GE today?)

I spent many hours looking for Fossett on my computer. It was an interesting challenge but bore no fruit because his tube-and-fabric airplane had crashed under a small conifer and burned up. So what was left was blackened tubing, much like a burnt up chaise lounge. Visual resolution on the photos wasn't good enough to detect that. And if it was, the number of false targets would be overwhelming.

The false targets were overwhelming. There is an excellent documentry (trailer on Youtube) made on the Steve Fossett search in which the search coordinators state that they had so many people who used Google maps to search for Fossett and report false leads that the coordinators had to change their phone number. You can hear them briefly describe this starting at about 1:50 in the above Youtube link. There is also mention of it on Wikipedia's Steve Fossett entry

The documentary can be purchased online here. Scroll down to the "OTHER ONE-HOUR SPECIALS" section. Note that the documentary was made before Fossett's remains were discovered.