Webmasters now report sites not being crawled for weeks, with Google SERPS (search engine results pages) returning old pages, and failing to return results for phrases that used to bear fruitful results.
"Some sites have lost 99 per cent of their indexed pages," reports one member of the Webmaster World forum. "Many cache dates go back to 2004 January." Others report long-extinct pages showing up as "Supplemental Results."
Google intended to remove spam pages from the index, but apparently they removed innocent pages. The amount of spam that shows up as top result is still high at Google, but less significant if you compare it with Yahoo and MSN.
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, said in March that Google has "a huge machine crisis". But that can't be a reason for not indexing pages. Probably the non-spam sites dropped from the index are just collateral damages.