[maccard]

Yes. Google search is infinitely more useful when mildly personalised rather than based on sheer popularity. If I search for drainage companies, I don't care who the most popular drainage company in the world is, ad it's highly likely to be weighted towards somewhere more populous. When I look at reviews for services, tracking can be used by Google and co to attempt to verify that the person who left a 5* review actually used the service and wasn't an employee, or that the 1* review isn't from a competitor.

Ease of use is another, albeit less clear cut. If Ticketmaster knows I like heavy metal, they don't need to send me newsletters (that I opt in to manually of course) telling me about the upcoming country music gigs.

To be clear, I don't think that the current players are being useful to me as a consumer, they are abusing my data, but that's not to say that there is no use for tracking or personalisation,

[dwaite]

Tracking in this context involves cross-organizational sharing of user information, usually information behavior in particular. So it isn't that Google has my location data or that Ticketmaster knows I've been to a heavy metal concert - it is that Google finds out I was at a Ticketmaster heavy metal concert.

[maccard]

I disagree that it's cross organisational. OPs question was "is tracking useful" and the article is talking about sharing info between apps.

Being logged into Facebook messenger because I'm logged into the Facebook app, gmail having access to info from gcal, Ticketmaster having access to livenation preferences are all examples of sharing within the same organisarion that benefit a user.

[hellofunk]

> Google search is infinitely more useful

I can definitely see how it could be more useful, but I don’t agree that the actual factor of this increase in productivity is infinite. Maybe a factor of 3 to 5.

[smichel17]

Having used duckduckgo for a few years, which does not personalize results by default, I don't think it's even that much. More like, a factor of 3-5 on select searches and not at all (occasionally even negative) on others.

[maccard]

I thought it was fairly clear that I was being hyperbolic. I don't see how you would decide what that factor actually is, but to me, anonymised results across the population of gogoele search are often going to be useless, so if the addition of any metadata gives them any use whatsoever, then it's infinitely useful than a completely useless query.

That said, you're arguing semantics about the relative worth of the results, even if it is a factor of 5, that is more useful, and the answer to OPs question of is tracking useful is "yes".

[hellofunk]

I appreciate your rather lengthy rebuttal to my rather trivial retort.