A quick link out to Newssift, a news search engine produced by The Financial Times. The site uses semantic search technology, as well as a bit of analysis on the search results to create an interesting new product. While they don't reveal their content sources (and I wish they would at least provide a list of some sort), they have this statement on their site: "Newssift sources consist of thousands of global business news sources and millions of articles, spanning news portals, magazines, newspapers, news wires, research sources, online news, television and radio, and expert commentary."

I could see this being used for quick searches, current awarenes/monitoring type searches as well as to help refine searches and discover relationships between subjects. 

Check it out at: http://www.newssift.com/index.jsp.