b) The tricky part is probably proving a business relationship. Otherwise someone could be a jerk and start shilling for their competitors just to get them fined.
The smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a hobby or type of product are actually some of the worst for astroturfing from what I've seen. It only takes a few shills to start building consensus.
There's a really interesting pattern where you'll see one person start a thread asking "Hey, any recs for durable travel pants?" Then a second comment chimes in "No specific brands, just make sure you get ones that have qualities x, y, and z". Then a third user says "Oh my Ketl Mountain™ travel pants have those exact traits!" Taken on their own the threads look fairly legit and get a lot of engagement and upvotes from organic users (maybe after some bot upvoted to prime the pump)
Then if you dump the comments of those users and track what subreddits they've interacted on, they've had convos following the same patterns about boots in BuyItForLife, Bidets in r/Bidets, GaN USB chargers in USBCHardware, face wash in r/30PlusSkincare, headphones, etc. You can build a whole graph of shilling accounts pushing a handful of products.
I think it goes to show how easy it is to get reddit karma. I wrote a bot that uses 2 regular expressions to generate reddit comments. In the 16 days since I created it, it's amassed more than 7k karma (despite substantial downtime due to bugs)
If you call it something more verbose like <x>ian day, people are just gonna shorten it in conversation to "day" and then you end up with confusing ambiguities.
big fat disclaimer: I'm about to start working at a competitor to DDG
However I've found that DDG has a really hard time when you have minor typos in your query, or when it includes really common words
When I type in semi-remembered song lyrics into Google, I'm usually able to find the song. I haven't had the same luck with DDG (one example of semi-remembered lyrics I tried to look up was "streetlight reflect piss streets". DDG doesn't give anything useful. If you add the word "lyrics" to the query, it gives you a list of maybe a dozen songs about lights and even some songs about urine, but not the one I was looking for. Even without adding the word lyrics, Google's first result is an infobox saying "Fat Cats, Bigga Fish|Song by The Coup", with the full lyrics and some links to listen to it.
I also had a hard time trying to look up info on DDG regarding Google employee benefits. Maybe that's intentional :)
At one point, the top search result for "Google vision plan" was a link to google.fr/maps (DDG actually gives some useful results now, but it didn't when I looked previously)
Another interesting query to compare for me was "subaru outback gate OR garage opener"
DDG just gives links to Lowes, Home Depot, Walmart, and other places to buy garage door/gate openers. The first Google result is a video for how to teach a Subaru Outback how to open a gate/garage (which is what I actually wanted). Maybe I'm just used to the level of vagueness that lets Google give me useful results, which isn't explicit enough for DDG?
I wish I had come across this article when I was looking for a dock for my MBP (connected to a pair of 4k monitors). It was a pain to try and figure out if I'd be able to get 60hz video from a particular docking station. I went with the Caldigit one and luckily it worked. It's nice to learn why.
I tried using the new 1558 model on the headlines of news articles and the results were surprisingly decent. Maybe 1/5 of the articles were plausible, and 1/5 were comically awful (Things got pretty zany when I plugged in an LA Times article titled "Yes, Elsa and Anna wear pants in 'Frozen 2.' And yes, it’s a big deal."). Of the remaining 60% of the articles, a lot could be made plausible with some light human editing. I also didn't fine-tune the model or tweak many parameters, which I'm assuming would lead to even better results.
I did notice that some types of articles tended to be easier to fake. A sports article asking a coach about his team's performance would end up spouting the same handful of platitudes, and some random sports statistics that sound realistic unless you look into them. Some articles that were more on the wonk side of things (lots of statistics and not a lot of context) also seemed to produce decent results, although I'm sure they're ridiculous if you're in expert in the subject matter of unemployment figures or auditing a city for overtime charges.
a) Is the current FTC going to care?
b) The tricky part is probably proving a business relationship. Otherwise someone could be a jerk and start shilling for their competitors just to get them fined.