Xan Porter (our favorite lady in the IR sphere) points us to some research on the subject of search engines helping new pages and sites to be seen, rather than hiding them (ala sandbox or filthy linking rich theory).

“The Egalitarian Effect of search engines” introduces the research that this team carried out on website rankings in search engines.  They believe that when user behavior is taken into consideration as well as the method of ranking used the search engines, new websites are getting plenty of attention.  This opposes the sandbox argument.

I'm glad to see Xan back on the blog trail - we missed you!