caveman - 5:43 am on Sep 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

OK Jake, my 2 cents...

"When one has ruled out the possible, one must consider the impossible." -- Spock

I don't buy the explanation that it's intended to be a method of stopping spam. Why? One, there's too much collateral damage it is doing.

Eminantly logical. The problem with this line of reasoning (if it is a problem) is that if it is true, then we must rule out any course of action that G took freely, i.e., by choice.

That is, if we assume that they would not cause so much damage by choice, then sandboxing, whatever it is, must have been necessary. Or at best, a devil's choice.

If this line of thinking is correct, then theories like the one suggesting that they're run out of space gain credibility. And indeed, perhaps they're out buying storage right now with their IPO proceeds.

Two, if you accept the 80/20 principle (20% of spammers are doing 80% of the spamming), and you realize that there are multiple ways already of beating the sandbox that all of those spammers are aware of, it doesn't make sense anymore.

This argument I have heard, but have more trouble with. They will *never* stop all the spammers, and they know it. But in fact it was getting such that any Tom Dick or Harriet could put up a site and game G. Then the gamers would come here and boast about how they put up a 10,000 page site last week and today they're number one in the SERP's for hundreds of KW's. I've said before, I cringed every time I read one of those posts. Webmasters ganging up to collectively shoot themselves in the feet. Brilliant.

With that in mind, is it so surprising that G would at least take out some of the spammers that were making them look ... um ... *really* bad?

So, why does the sandbox exist? The most obvious effect of the sandbox is that it prevents new domains (not pages) from ranking for any relatively competitive term. So, start thinking like a search engine - what would be the benefit of this?

Given what we know about:
--the increase of auto generated sites/pages
--G's dissatisfaction with too many affiliates
--feeds making dup content more prevalent,
--etc, etc, etc,...
yes, it's easy for me to believe that killing new pages, increasingly being dumped into the Web by a growing swell of new, short-term oriented webmasters....was a short term goal to produce a short term shake out.

Does John Q. Public know or care? Not.

Even a bunch of smart people inside the same company can make a collectively bad decision. I think that is what is happening here.

Like a caveman knows anything. All I know really well is cave stuff. Ooops, gotta go; cavewoman is calling... :-)