The incredible shrinking GOOG! 25% smaller...

Something strange is going on, Google seems to be shedding huge amounts of its index. By my simple measure, the size of its index has shrunk by nearly 25 per cent over a period of just over 5 months. At this rate it will be half the size by the end of this year!

Occasionally, I will Google myself just to see what content others are linking to and what they are saying. But lately I've noticed that my citations in Google are shrinking. I'm producing ever more content, but Google is finding fewer references.

Let me give you a point of comparison. On March 3 2009 I wrote: Internet Myth: Watch What You Post Because Search Will Reveal Everything Forever.

At that time I Googled "Tom Foremski" and it came up with a search result of 135,000 pages in Google's index.

Today, I did the same search, and came up with 102,000 pages in Google's index.

I tried Bing and got 157,000 results.

What's going on? Has Google run out of room? Is it deleting older content from its index? Or is it just me? I've no other point of comparison. Let me know if you've noticed something similar.