Incoming links in Dashboard suddenly disappear and changes taking time to happen

Hi, I’ve just noticed that on a couple of my blogs on the Dashboard where it says Incoming Links and used to give me a list of, you guessed it, incoming links now says “This dashboard widget queries Google Blog Search so that when another blog links to your site it will show up here. It has found no incoming links… yet. It’s okay — there is no rush.”

Which is weird.

And also I’ve been noticing that if I made a change to, say, the sidebar in the theme it takes literally minutes for the effect to take place despite numerous browser refreshing and throwing away of cache.

I appreciate these may not be WordPress issues but something with my host or computer but I just wondered if anyone else has experienced anything like this. Thank you.