The folks over DigitalPoint forums have a thread named Anyone noticed something wrong with the "site:" command?, where members are reporting the lose of pages in drastic numbers.
One member reports, "Some missing pages have PR6 for almost a year." An other member reported "Our count has gone dow 15,000 pages (21,000 to 6,000)."
Of course the rumors and speculation about a major update starts up in this thread.