It would allow Google or other companies to track which result the user clicked without resorting to more complex JavaScript tracking or redirects.
I bet anyone would prefer the ping method rather than the redirects we see on Firefox that mangle copied urls.
You seem to be of the opinion that no tracking would be better. And that's fine and a popular opinion around here. But that's not an option as Google relies heavily on the clicks as an input for ranking.
So in a context where you consider tracking HAS to happen ping does offer advantages for the user.
The desired result is indicated in red, well below the page break. All of the other results are blogspam, SEO hacking, and mostly useless "featured snippets" and "people also ask".
Because then you could at least see the URL you're going to instead of the redirect the site is going to use to track you anyway.
This attribute doesn't do anything shady, and would do the opposite if it were actually used. The whole idea is to be able to provide the tracking data the site will get one way or the other, but with the ping attribute, you can do it without mangling the URLs.
If everybody was using "ping" instead of their various other tracking solutions (Javascript, redirecting) then you could just disable it in browser settings.
That's the whole point: to give link tracking a simple consistent interface, which makes it much easier to implement (no JavaScript libraries or proxy URLs) and to disable (a user agent can very easily choose whether to respect the ping).
> which makes it much easier to implement (no JavaScript libraries or proxy URLs)
I don't want it to be easy to implement.
> and to disable (a user agent can very easily choose whether to respect the ping).
This post is about Google working around that and just falling back to the old redirect-based click tracking for browsers that do not enable pings by default.
So having the attribute increased the browser complexity, brought no value to the user and only helped the tracking industry.
