It's kinda funny how I was talking with my wife and how she had noticed a while back how the question and answer pairs that have been added to search results are slightly "off" and how they are full of questions that nobody in their right mind would really ask.
I would contrast that to the spam question/answer farms that popped up in the early 2000's that actually did improve Google's question answering abilities and really did contain mad-lib generated questions that people would really ask, like
"What is the population of X?"
or
"If X and Y had a fight who would win?"
Market forces led these spammers to a certain minimal level of quality because they were in it for the money, could make more if their pages were indexed and ranked, and they knew they'd get canned if their efforts made Google look stupid.
In contrast to the questions Google inserts that cosplay as real questions but it doesn't matter if they are any good or not because Google is a monopoly so it doesn't matter if Google is any good or not or even looks stupid anymore.
For me, now, Google is using the OP article as the "answer", highlighting the quoted incorrect answer from Quora, "Yes, an egg can be melted"...
The irony is full circle, from the article, re. a similar situation is 2017:
"attempted to rectify inaccurate recipes about how long it takes to caramelize onions, but his correct answer ended up fueling Google's incorrect response because the algorithm pulled the wrong information from his article"
I think there is a good debate to be had first about the definition of "melt" and why the AI answer is potentially correct. However perhaps not using a stove or microwave.
I would contrast that to the spam question/answer farms that popped up in the early 2000's that actually did improve Google's question answering abilities and really did contain mad-lib generated questions that people would really ask, like
"What is the population of X?"
or
"If X and Y had a fight who would win?"
Market forces led these spammers to a certain minimal level of quality because they were in it for the money, could make more if their pages were indexed and ranked, and they knew they'd get canned if their efforts made Google look stupid.
In contrast to the questions Google inserts that cosplay as real questions but it doesn't matter if they are any good or not because Google is a monopoly so it doesn't matter if Google is any good or not or even looks stupid anymore.