Not to pour cold water on this issue, but most of the immages on Google Earth are months if not years old. We use it all the time for doing preliminary site work and conversions to approximate cad details for proposed projects. We then obtain the actual survey information to do the specific detail work. It is a good tool but again, most images were taken long before he became missing.
Once in Google Earth, in the layers section of the side toolbar, clicking the DigitalGlobe Coverage checkboxes for the appropriate year will then show on the screen when the image were taken.
That was my first thought. I'm not familiar with "Mechanical Turk" but google-earth photos are often several years old. The photo of my house, for example, is at least 3 or 4 years old, not showing some changes that we've made in the last few years. So finding someone who went down in the last few days doesn't sound right.
New satellite images of the area were done just for this search.
Mazda, wrong on Google earth images. At least in this particular case. The images for the area in which Fosset went down were updates the day after he went down, to ensure that they were fresh images. So you’re not pouring cold water, you’re misinformed in this particular case.