Clear you cookies before you go looking for travel bargains

Did you know that your search history can affect the price you pay for goods when you shop on the web?  Neither did I.  This article in the Guardian suggests otherwise though.

Search data, he says, “is arguably the most personal data people are entering into anything. You’re typing in your problems, your desires. It’s not the same as things you post publicly on a social network.”

So why does Google store it? “It’s a myth that Google needs to store all this data about you. Almost all the money they make on search is based on what you type into the search box. Nothing more. They need to track you for their other services – Gmail, YouTube – because those are hard to monetise, and that’s why you get ads following around the internet all the time.” (Google owns DoubleClick, the largest display ad supplier online.).

Having your data passed around can also lead you to be charged more for an item: if your browsing history shows you visit high-end sites, some sites will increase prices. (That’s why plane fares can drop if you delete the “cookie” files in your browser.)   My emphasis.

So, the next time you go looking for flight or hotel deals, clear your cookies before you start to search.  It’s not enough to use a search engine like Duckduckgo or Startpage that anonymise your searches, as when you hit the sites the cookies will be read by the website.

Hopefully it will save you some money.  I’ll certainly be trying it out the next time I go shopping on the web.