Am I correct to assume that this is simply an historical file and that using something like Cocktail to make it visible and then deleting it is not going to net any real gain - like screwing up the tracking people.
I don't know what its actual purpose is, but i find it odd that it wants to
persist forever (e.g., clearing history and reset safari have no effect usually). Is that intentional (on Apple's part), or a bug in Safari? [i.e., it simply overlooked any need to delete dot files in the History folder, because Apple doesn't create them.]
? idunno.
Also curious is how little info we obtain about it via google (or bing, etc).
FWIW, .tracked filenames.plist, as mentioned elsewhere, seems to consist of the URLs of sites which came up as Google search results and were actually visited.
That's some of it, yes. And i think changing our default search engine from google to something else may have an effect as well. [i have not conducted rigorous experiments or anything.]
But i've also seen certain facebook urls sitting in there (sans any google relationship). ::shrug::
I use a shell script to
srm the puppy, which i run every time i quit Safari.
[edit/ NB: avoid running
srm on entire folders while using wildcards (especially the asterisk:
folder/*). I normally aim it at
specific file paths. (it's not crafted as cautiously as regular
rm is).]
