I noticed this as well. Two of my sites were hit hard. One, however, I've been able to come back from. Turns out, I had a rogue link to my index page (rather than the root url) and that caused a shedload of duplicate content trouble for me. I fixed the problem, and hours later, my rankings had returned. I haven't yet figured out what is wrong with the other site, but I'd be willing to bet it is something similar.

I noticed this as well. I was able to track it down to some kind of cache issues google was having. Some of my cached pages were months and months old. It took about 7 days for google to start to get its cache refreshed. Once they did it took about another 3 days to update a lot of cached pages containing some of my backlinks.

I still have several pages which use to be cached in google, but now are no longer found.

I thought it was funny that google did this during pubcon. I really don’t think this was a coincidence.

They did something funky with the index over the weekend. It looked like a major update yesterday. Some key searches were producing URL-only listings in the results.

It's too soon to be sure but I'm still seeing significant changes in SERPs. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss what people are saying. Complaints are usually a strong signal of change in ranking strategies with the search engines.

One of our sites (less than 1 year old) has started to rank in top 10 for most of our target keywords during the last week. For some of the keywords we were not even in top 30. So we are considering it has an update. Don't know if its an algo update or an index update so far.

is there any way to personally update your cached pages on google?

Don't think so.