The first is that Google has specifically chosen to call out an answer in some kind. If the query is reasonably framed as a question, there is a clear indication in the UI that the response is meant to be an answer to that question.
Now it's definitely the case that a lot of questions have some amount of semantic ambiguity that a listener would have to resolve. For example, a question about a "president" can reasonably be inferred to mean specifically a "US president" of some kind, at least if the query is from the US and is in English.
And sometimes people can ask questions where there's a confused detail. And responding with the question they probably meant to ask is not unreasonable.
However--and this is a big however--it is incumbent to emphasize that the answer is for a different question than the one that was literally asked. You see this when you do searches of misspelled terms: "did you mean this one instead?" Because occasionally, no, you did mean the term that has much fewer results.
And this kind of emphasize-the-answer can have poor results sometimes. Ask Google which president became supreme dictator. The answer makes it clear why it thinks that, but... that's a really different question from the one that was asked.
The first is that Google has specifically chosen to call out an answer in some kind. If the query is reasonably framed as a question, there is a clear indication in the UI that the response is meant to be an answer to that question.
Now it's definitely the case that a lot of questions have some amount of semantic ambiguity that a listener would have to resolve. For example, a question about a "president" can reasonably be inferred to mean specifically a "US president" of some kind, at least if the query is from the US and is in English.
And sometimes people can ask questions where there's a confused detail. And responding with the question they probably meant to ask is not unreasonable.
However--and this is a big however--it is incumbent to emphasize that the answer is for a different question than the one that was literally asked. You see this when you do searches of misspelled terms: "did you mean this one instead?" Because occasionally, no, you did mean the term that has much fewer results.
And this kind of emphasize-the-answer can have poor results sometimes. Ask Google which president became supreme dictator. The answer makes it clear why it thinks that, but... that's a really different question from the one that was asked.