steveb - 11:21 pm on Apr 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

"Why should they need to start at the ground floor and go through a hazing ritual with Google when they don't need to anywhere else, online or offline?"

Why shouldn't they? That's the problem with the idea, and I know it's yours not Googles. It would be purely corrupt to allow some people to launch new sites and rank, while exact peers cannot.

Suppose some company has a five site network. Suppose an exact competitor has a one site network.
Suppose now they both want to launch a domain based on a new zero calorie thingee. Why should the five domain company be able to just get a URL and move a website and start with years of algo value, while the other company could not? Yes, they could stick new content on their one domain, but why should they be penalized.

There is absolutely zero reason that you should be able to take all the content from site1.com and put it on site2.com while you can't take some of the content from site3.com and put it on site4.com. And then that doesn't even address why site5.com would be disallowed from competing entirely.

The sandbox is dumb, but if they are going to have it then it should be equally applied to everyone.