I don't know Danny but as a neutral party he came off awful and not the right person to meet with reporters. He is neither warm or helpful nor entertaining or thoughtful (humble, etc). He comes off as a burned out newspaper columnist.
I think the key problem is he will play with words and what they mean by parsing them in a way to misunderstand the true meaning behind the question and then uses tries to make you feel less. Does he really not understand why writers are saying no one can find anything (translation: Google is showing less pages for keywords searched, less content is being returned and more ads are poluting the results)? He changes it into: millions are searching, I can take a picture of an apple and google will find it. Search results are better he says(in a see you are wrong and stupid for suggesting this). He completely misses the point.. EVERYONE is noticing how bad the results compared to what they were. Sure, millions of searches happen every day still.. but people are unhappy and they see the quality as lower. People don't automatically leave unless there is a reason and place to go to.
Google is giving them a good reason.
Google shouldn't have sent someone who could have a thoughtful discussion or an honest discussion or a deceitful but pleasant conversation.
I don't think this guy personally is the reason why things went off the rails but he paints a picture that the search team has their heads in the sand and they are patting themselves on the back with how great results are when everyone can see the emperor has no clothes on.
Gary Illyes and John Mueller (other prominent Google liaisons) are also kind of standoffish. Ginny Marvin is another SEland hire, but isn't as mean spirited, but is still as limited in how helpful responses are. John and Gary commonly mock people asking questions and just parrot Google's speaking points of "just create quality content and we will rank it well" that frequently do not mirror reality. If you have SEO questions, your only other official channel for support are Google forums-- maintained by volunteers outside of Google. That SEOs have no official support from the most prominent search engine (besides ambiguous documentation, ~5 liaisons and forums of dubious value) is laughable. If your site gets deindexed or penalized, good luck finding out why with Google.
With Bing Webmaster tools, I have actually emailed support and gotten a bug fixed within 2 weeks. With Google, your best option is yelling into the abyss.
I know it was a long post I made. But yes, I (and we) recognize people want the results better. I covered this at the end (along with some other parts):
"That said, there’s room to improve. There always is. Search and content can move through cycles. You can have a rise in unhelpful content, and search systems evolve to deal with it. We’re in one of those cycles. I fully recognize people would like to see better search results on Google. I know how hard people within Google Search are working to do this. I’m fortunate to be a part of that. To the degree I can help — which includes better communicating, ensuring that I reflect the humbleness that we — and I feel — I’ll keep improving on myself."
I think the key problem is he will play with words and what they mean by parsing them in a way to misunderstand the true meaning behind the question and then uses tries to make you feel less. Does he really not understand why writers are saying no one can find anything (translation: Google is showing less pages for keywords searched, less content is being returned and more ads are poluting the results)? He changes it into: millions are searching, I can take a picture of an apple and google will find it. Search results are better he says(in a see you are wrong and stupid for suggesting this). He completely misses the point.. EVERYONE is noticing how bad the results compared to what they were. Sure, millions of searches happen every day still.. but people are unhappy and they see the quality as lower. People don't automatically leave unless there is a reason and place to go to. Google is giving them a good reason.
Google shouldn't have sent someone who could have a thoughtful discussion or an honest discussion or a deceitful but pleasant conversation.
I don't think this guy personally is the reason why things went off the rails but he paints a picture that the search team has their heads in the sand and they are patting themselves on the back with how great results are when everyone can see the emperor has no clothes on.