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Some people have suggested that Google has ruined the serps intentionally to make people go for their AdWords, but I just can't see it. They gained their popularity by producing the most relevant serps of all the engines and they are not about to intentionally produce rubbish results or they will follow other engines and become an also-ran.
There are some nonsense results for your searchterm (websites for sale), as you pointed out. That's partly due to the fact that, for Google, the term is "websites sale". They drop the stopword "for". Even so there are still some nonesense results.
I haven't heard the suggestion that Google has lost some backlinks data before. If it had happened, I guess that people all over the place would be saying that their backlinks have gone down drastically. I'd say that your backlinks are down because of the backlinks update a few weeks ago. It's not unusual for backlinks to go up or down.
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