When browsing any website using the regular http protocol, your connection is unsecure and allows third parties to intercept what you are doing online. To prevent this the https protocol is used that encrypts data sent between your browser and the server. Usually you find https on login pages, credit card payment pages and other “secure” types of things you do.
Earlier this year, Google [GOOG] started securing GMail.com connections with https so that sessions on GMail were secure to prevent third parties snooping in.
On Friday, Google announced that the main search pages of google are now secured. The pages can be found at https://www.google.com. What this does is encrypt your search sessions with Google to prevent third parties snooping in. The https version is optional and by default you are still taken to the regular version.
When in https mode, a new logo is displayed that indicates you are in secure mode. Just to be clear here though, Google still collects all the same data it does when performing searches on the un-encrypted search pages. The only difference is that your searches are secure from those looking in who shouldn’t be.
Also, the secure Google search pages are still in beta mode because it hasn’t been rolled out everywhere just yet. If jumping out of a regular search to image or news search for example, these connections will then be unsecure.
Full details can be found over at Google.
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