Does the sandbox effect hurt relevancy?

A short while ago I wrote a short piece in the Search Engine Watch Forum titled “Does the sandbox effect hurt relevancy?”. Since that time the thread has been quite busy with various members of the SEO community offering their thoughts on the topic. Below, I have reprinted the original posting that I entered into the forum but if you are interested in the topic you should go to the Search Engine Watch forum to read the responses and get in on the topic.

Does the sandbox effect hurt relevancy?
Recently I read an article on the quality of organic search results comparing the top 3 search engines. If memory serves it was by Danny Sullivan. The article spoke of the index war between Yahoo.com and Google.com. Again, if memory serves, the conclusion was not so much on who had the bigger index but the quality of the returns. Sound about right?

Anyway, the thought I want to bring up is this… If the search engines are all saying that their main goal is to return relevant results for search queries, how can Google’s alleged age delaying sandbox be considered helpful when the application of the filter may be keeping searchers from important information when that information is contained within a new site? Seems to me that this policy is defeating the potential quality of the results returned.

I suppose that I should be writing an article on this subject and flying it out to the various article feeder sites in an effort to try to bring more traffic to my site but frankly, I just don’t have the time. If one of you out there in the SEO land wants to champion this question please feel free, just let me know if you do so I can read the article.