Wikipedia looks more and more like those metal rings -spun over glass-
that had archived the world's collective wisdom in the movie "The Time
Machine" with Rod Taylor. And yep, there is a page for this movie too
in there.

The only thing I remember about the "sandbox effect" was something
said by Matt Cutts when he made a reference regarding how webmasters
go about promoting/marketing their sites. It was implied that the more
you try to get traffic in other ways, the more Google will notice it
and this alone could override the effect. It was also implied that the
true goal of whatever had been put in place wasn't to reproduce such
'sandbox' but that this came about as a side effect, which make them
very pleased...