I've been following this on Twitter, and frankly the search is useful for one thing only: identifying people who tweet from there. For any real information, you have to go directly to their full streams. The search results are cluttered to no end with retweets and it's hard to tell if the retweet you're seeing on the front page of results is of a story from two hours. Just identify the usernames of most commonly retweeted people and get the information from them.

Incidentally Google News has been very useful in locating more official accounts.