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"sandbox" is something of a misnomer IMO.
What it appears to be, was originally a "time delay" that applied to links as Google discovered them, which held off the ranking weight so did not allow sites to come out of the starting gate with thousands or tens of thousands of links and appear at the top of the SERPs within a few weeks.
This is how the link spammers worked, and needless to say these were the first people to start complaining about this (no names mentioned to protect the guilty) and this delay was the Google means of combating the problem of their own making. Had their algo not been so sensitive to anchor text for ranking the issue would probably not occured
Matt Cutts has said that the current aging delay was not a deliberate design by the algo engineers but decided that it worked in their favour anyway so found what caused it and used it. Although it is not a good idea to take what he says as absolute fact, it can be a pointer for your own observations.
The exclusion patterns search was a way of nullifying some of the effects of various updates and soon after being discovered and published ceased to work. Quite possibly an engineers "back door" to test the effects.
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