For easier access for discussion, the full paragraph is: "Danny Sullivan, Google’s “public liaison for search,” told me that people using Google to find Reddit threads is actually evidence that search is working the way it should. Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires. If they wanted, they could refine their queries, limiting results by, say, price point (“toaster $40 . . . $100”) or by listing certain terms to exclude (“ ‘toaster’ NOT ‘oven’ ”). As machine-learning algorithms have grown more pervasive, we’ve lost some of the fluency with search that older Internet adopters may have learned in a high-school Boolean tutorial. “There’s a shift now where, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you blame the search engine,” Sullivan said. At the same time, he admitted that many users have a desire for “more noncommercial information, more community-based information.”"

Maybe it's just me, but I thought the middle section of the paragraph wasn't relevant to the first sentence. I speculate, with charitable interpretations, that the order of events was:

1) The reporter asked Sullivan whether the frequent use of "Reddit" in search terms indicated a problem.

2) Sullivan asserted that Google is useful for searching for results restricted to a domain, then shifted to say that Google still gives relevant results if you use Boolean search terms.

3) Potentially after a follow-up question, Sullivan conceded that much of the results that Google returns is commercial instead of community-made.

From a writing perspective, I found it unclear whether the middle section that starts with "Users on the whole have become passive, relying on Google to anticipate their desires" was analysis by the author or part of Sullivan's response. I interpreted the sentences as part of Sullivan's response from the context, though it would have been clearer if the writing more explicitly indicated whether this was part of Sullivan's reported speech.