Google Encrypted Search Gets a New Domain

About a month ago Google introduced a great new feature for the more security conscious, encrypted search. Visitors to https://www.google.com would have their entire session encrypted making it almost impossible to intercept by a third-party.

It was a great win for privacy but a very particular problem arose, schools started complaining that students were using the encrypted search to bypass the Internet content filters most institutions have installed. Google recognized the problem and has now moved encrypted search over to a new domain, https://encrypted.google.com, as a temporary solution.

In May Google launched the encrypted search site. Labeled as a beta, it was the next step in the company’s plan to enforce better security in its products. Encrypted connections to Gmail had recently been made default and with the Chinese hacking incident leaving its marks on the company, Google is not taking chances anymore.

But soon after the encrypted search was introduced, schools complained that students were using it to search for ‘inappropriate terms’ as regular web filters can’t snoop in on encrypted communications.

In practical terms, this wasn’t really much of a problem, when a student left the search results page the encrypted connection would be closed and the page with the inappropriate content would be blocked by the filters. What’s more, it’s unclear how much of an issue this really was, most students wouldn’t even know that the encrypted Google version existed.

However, it posed a problem for schools which were forced to block the secure domain Google used. But this also blocked any Google service that used the google.com domain and encryption, like Apps, Docs and so on. The solution came from Google which vowed to move the encrypted search site to a dedicated domain at least until a more permanent solution, like moving the Google authentication services to a separate domain. The secure Google Search can now be accessed here.