[hmcq6]

Hard disagree on the impact this will have on (2). When Russia attempted to interfere with the 2016 election they did so overwhelmingly through social media, not by polluting google search.

And “saving users time while searching” is more likely to be accomplished by improving your query->result pipeline and not by improving a tangentially associated technology

[aguaviva]

No one is suggesting that these bots will in any way influence ("pollute", per your spin) Google search. Obviously Google won't be incorporating their output, and if anything they'll actively block it the moment they get wind of it.

Also, I didn't specifically say these bots would save users time "while searching", i.e. while using a regular search engine. Though I didn't dig too deeply into the T4P proposal (so I don't know what they're proposing), my own guess is that people would seek out these bots as an alternative to general-purpose search engines -- for example as a sidebar on their favorite news sites.