Google has made yet another big announcement this week with the release of Google SSL Search Beta. This addition to Google’s lineup makes a big step forward in enhancing privacy while searching for content on the web.
Right now, if you are searching on Yahoo or the standard Google web search, your search terms are not encrypted. This means, if a hacker had access to the network you are using (your home or local coffee shop for example) they would be able to see, in plain text, what you were searching for.
Google SSL Search Beta takes the next step and encrypts the search data, so hackers won’t have access to it.
Think of SSL encryption as this. If I was sending you a message in mores code, I would send you a series of short and long beeps. If I used SSL encryption, my message would be rearranged and jumbled to a point where nobody would be able to understand it, except you and me.
The first thing you may want to do is ensure all of your searches are made using Google SSL Search in Google Chrome. To do this we will create a new search engine in Chrome and set it as our default.
Name: Google SSH
Keyword: google
URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s
Now all of your search’s in Google Chrome will be secured with 128bit encryption. There are a couple of caveats right now with Google SSL Beta. First off, SSL can reduce load times, but should be marginal as Google is so fast already and secondly, only your standard web queries will be encrypted at the moment. If the future Google image search and news, for example, will also have the option to be encrypted.
Hence the beta tag.
For more info on Google’s SSL Search, check out the SSL search help page.
Why would anyone care if a hacker can see what your searching for?
You would care if the hacker was from another country, perhaps China or India, and they were monitoring where you use your credit card online. That would make it very easy to present you with a fake website that looks exactly like the one you are used to seeing while using your credit card online.
The reasons we should use Google SSL search are not hiding crimes and malicious behavior, they are protecting yourself from identity theft and credit card fraud. Secrecy is a double edged sword that has two very distinct sides.
This doesn’t work anymore with the latest Chrome. It cannot be set as the default search engine.
Kellan, are you using the beta version of chrome? I am using version 6.0.472.63 and have no problem using these directions.
Do you have more specifics on what the problem is?
Jeremy,
I just noticed the second half of the URL that you provided and it’s working now. Thank you for your help!
You need only to use
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s
as the URL.
Jeremy,
Could you please remove my comments from this webpage, or remove my last name? Google has indexed this page. I’d really appreciate it, thanks.
Kellan
I have removed you last name from your comments Kellan. I will go ahead and remove the page from Google’s cached pages also. That way only the updated page will be found through Google.