> eliminates tons of valuable content

They aren’t eliminating it, just downranking it. Given Kagi’s search quality, ad and tracking density seems to negatively correlate with site quality.

And the type of tracking they’re referring to is more like selling-your-data-to-third-parties tracking, not Google or New Relic or something. Maybe sales funnel tracking and interstitial popovers. Your average Adblock doesn’t distinguish between tracking methods and goals but trying to block all pages that load Google Analytics would probably lead to an incredibly small pool of websites, which would worsen the results.

Anti-tracking has gone mainstream enough among America’s elite that I’ve seen executives who are otherwise not tech savvy find themselves unable to load a page (or follow through a tracked link in an email), figure it’s because it’s infested and—on that basis—move on from that vendor.

The valuable content is still available in the Google dreamworld for anyone not yet ready to take the red pill.

Honestly, I don't care to visit those businesses. Their sort of maximize-engagement attitude is the exact opposite of what I want.

I'd much rather get information from an individual or small group who is intrinsically motivated and is not just looking for the lowest bar of quality that won't make folks immediately bounce.

I also want to note that just putting Google Analytics on there doesn't kill the site's ranking. There are some sites that are just infested, and those are what get dramatically downranked.

Businesses can make decisions parsing their web server logs. There is no need to involve a third party data broker (or a half dozen) in the process.

It doesn't eliminate it silly. It downranks it and upranks things without a lot of tracking relative to Google.

So on Google you miss out on things that might otherwise be hidden gems because Google wouldn't rank it as highly.

There are tradeoffs on both sides.

I think this is a solid point. Google Analytics is a killer tool for website admins, and using _some_ kind of enhanced logging/parsing tool like this saves a ton of time over building your own solution or manually reviewing logs.

That said, I am still quite opposed to js that tracks users across the internet for advertisement purposes. I do use ad blockers despite the fact they block a lot of less-harmful tracking by default, which I don't love, but it's too much work to differentiate between. (At least adblock users are the minority of internet users in general, so hopefully Analytics users still get enough data to be helpful for their purposes.)