Google Rolls Out Encrypted Web Search Option

KirinMercury writes "Google began offering an encrypted option for Web searchers on Friday and said it planned to roll it out for all of its services eventually. People who want to use the more secure search option can type 'https://www.google.com' into their browser, scrambling the connection so the words and phrases they search on, and the results that Google displays, will be protected from interception." Note that you need the 'www' for it to work. Dropping it redirects you to a non-ssl page. You might have read this on Saturday, but if you missed it, it's still worth knowing.

Comments

Re:This will have interesting results for webmaste

[eln]

This seems likely, which of course has the very desirable (for Google) effect of locking website owners into Google Analytics. Of course, if you're a website owner who wants to run some other stats package, this is very bad news.

now we need encrypted /.

[Darth Sdlavrot]

Encrypted should be the default for every web site IMNSHO.

Re:MitM only?

[MoonBuggy]

Yes, but they need to subpoena them, which is a lot more work than automated monitoring.

More to the point, though, I said the more of the web goes SSL, my point being that something like the great firewall of China would be much harder to implement if most sites are on secure connections, thus only endpoints are known. Dissident news pages could be replicated across 'legitimate' domains, for example. Without live packet inspection it becomes much harder to decide who to block.

With Google providing security even for relatively non-sensitive data, there is hope of others following suit.