There is no doubt that Google is having some considerable problems despite the silence and lack of information flowing out of its headquarters.
Read the online forums and news articles. Whilst there has always been a strand of comment to the effect that – my site is not fully indexed, it must be a Google problem, there is a common theme flowing from industry sources which suggests that all is not well.
Long established sites loose 30% of their indexed pages.
Authoratitive sites loose 25% of their inbound links and their Link Popularity falls away.
The site enquiry returns a different number of pages daily for the indexed pages total in large sites.
New sites take weeks to be indexed but googlebot visits them every day.
Old pages turn up in the supplementary index cache, sometimes the pages are 12 to 18 months old.
The stockmarket is littered with major brands that did not survive. You are only as good as the service you offer and Google is very close to a tipping point when users switch to alternative search engines to get better quality results.
Once this happens market share declines, this has an impact on forecast advertising revenue and, as a public stock, the share price gets hammered. Low share price equates to low funds available for investment and the future is gone.
I hope the mega brains at Google get a handle on the current situation quickly as the service and quality of search results used to be excellent.
In the meantime it is hard to feel too much sympathy when you reflect on the thousands of much smaller businesses who are having a rough time because Google has messed up the indexing of their sites and visitor volumes have fallen away.