Google Moving Gradually Toward Encrypted Search

Google is moving to make queries and results from the company’s immensely popular search engine encrypted by default in the coming weeks, but only for users signed into their Google Accounts.

In a post on The Official Google Blog, the Mountain View based company claims signed-in users may begin noticing automatic redirects to the https variety of Google.com. The company claims that encrypting searches and their results will enhance security, particularly when users connect to the Internet over an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot.

It is unclear why Google has decided to roll secure browsing out to signed-in users only and whether or not this will eventually become the default for all Google searches.

In the meantime, sites will still be able to measure the amount of linkage they are receiving through Google searches. The difference will be that those third party sites will not receive information about individual queries. However, they can still receive list of the 1,000 most popular search queries that drove traffic to their site.

As always, you can run Google searches in secure browsing even if you aren’t signed in (or don’t have a Google account), but you will have to manually type ‘https’ into the browser.

In the wake of the Firesheep plug-in demo at Toorcon last year, a number of Internet platforms, Twitter and Facebook among them, have shifted to default https browsing to prevent easy snooping on Web sessions.

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