Re: Totally confused...

> Great question. If you ever find an answer, please share with us :-)

It seems obvious to me that major Google functions run asynchronously -
the "I download sitemaps only" server(s) are doing OK because they're
not overloaded - their job is to download sitemaps and update the
information in whatever database Google uses. They're not resource
constrained, so they appear to be doing their job.

Elsewhere in Google there are queues, and it looks to me like some of
the queues are SERIOUSLY overloaded. No longer do the bots download
every page - sometimes they don't even download every high-priority
(from my point of view) changed page. And indexing seems to have
fallen even further behind.

Google said some time ago that a number of servers were reserved for
things like site: and link: servers - I wonder if the now almost
catastrophic results being returned by link: searches are because some
of these servers have been reassigned.

I think Google has serious scalability problems.