I get the no ads part - but this article is ignoring that tracking tools may be an essential component of search engine effectiveness.

Something that most people miss is that at least part of what makes Google search so good (and Bing for that matter) _is_ the tracking.

Without the ability to track some user behaviors the quality of the search results would be impacted.

For example, if you click on a link and then immediately hit Back and perform a different query, you can infer that the link wasn't all that useful.

I don't like the idea of Google being "creepy" either, but I'm gladly willing to send them at least some of my data if it means I can get a better experience.

I hate web page bloat as much as the next guy, but is it really true that “analytics gobbletygook” is “pushing the size of a typical web page up to 1 MB”? The Google Analytics code is less than 500 bytes and loads a JavaScript file that is 32 KB. Analytics is a fairly small part of the problem.