A little bird passed me a rumor today that I can neither confirm or deny, but it's certainly worthy of discussion. The theory goes - when launching a new site, buying a significant quantity of AdWords/AdSense for the site is a good way to tell Google the site isn't spam and avoid long waits in the sandbox.

Here's my take on this:

• There is some logic in the idea that a site buying search advertising will not be, at the least, a low-grade, scraper style site
• Getting a new site approved with AdWords means that a quality rater is supposedly giving a manual review - perhaps this helps with sandboxing
• The logic that runs counter says that sandboxing is Google's way of preventing new sites from getting free traffic, thus forcing them to buy listings

While running some searches to investigate the phenomenon, I stumbled on what appears to be some new query refinements in the area of real estate:

Chicago Condos Search at Google

Note the location, property type, listing type and "remember this location" features offered. When I performed this search , I wasn't logged in, so any searcher should be able to get these results. Oddly enough, when I pasted the URL from IE into Firefox, I no longer saw the refinement options. I went ahead and selected "for sale" and clicked "Go" and was brought to these results in Google Base:

Google' Base Listings of Chicago Condos for Sale

So - two subjects to discuss... Do you think buying AdWords from Google can help a site escape sandboxing AND what's your opinion of the query refinement for real estate - can Google Base dominate real estate searches?