Google Offers Encrypted Search

Google Offers Encrypted Search

Google Offers Encrypted Search

Ever wonder if your ISP might be spying on you and intercepting your traffic? Well now you can put your paranoid self to rest as far as your ISP knowing what search terms you are searching on in Google.

Although your search terms might remain a secret between Google and you, technically speaking your ISP (and others) could still sniff out your browsing habits because the vast majority of web surfing is unencrypted and does not use an "SSL" connection. But you can hide what you are searching on, thanks to Google SSL Search (in Beta). If you visit https://google.com (note the 's' after the http), you will have an encrypted session between your browser and Google's search page. Just like an e-commerce enabled website where you use a secure site to type in your credit card information and then submit it, the data is encrypted and almost impossible to decrypt.

So if you're searching on some bizarre and weird search term like "kinky frog sex" and don't want your ISP to know, you can encrypt those searches using Google SSL. The search results will be encrypted as well. This will give you some degree of privacy and security. However, unless the sites that you click on in the results page are also using SSL, your visits to those sites will not be encrypted.

There are a couple of other "features" of using Google SSL for search that involve the fact that "referrers" are turned off. When you do use Google SSL search, and click through to one of the sites on the results page, it will not show up in the website log files that you arrived there from Google. This could have advantages to you especially with websites that have used "SEO Poisoning" to get high rankings on search results for popular search terms, but in reality, the website goal is to infect your computer with malicious software. Most search engine spiders that visit websites go directly to the site, therefore there is no referrer. Malicious website owners will use this fact to try to trick the search engines by offering up different content to visits that have no referrer information. Then, when someone clicks to the website from Google or some other link on the Internet, the content can be switched to that of the malicious code.

However, this could also pose some problems for webmasters who are keenly interested in their website traffic and where it comes from. Not knowing how you arrived or what search terms you used to get there can be detrimental to some webmasters in their future planning and their own search engine optimization. When webmasters check their server logs and statistical information, your IP address will show up, and the webmaster will know that there was a visit, and can see what pages you visited, but will have no idea how you arrived at their site.

Google SSL could be an interesting experiment. It is slower to use Google SSL as using encrypted sessions is slower than non-encrypted. I've played around with it a bit and the slowness has not been that noticeable to me but to some, it could be.

More information on Google SSL is available at Google's Search Help.

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