Google to Introduce Encrypted Search Next Week

Google had a painful announcement to make last night, revealing that it had been mistakenly collecting personal data with its Street View cars for the past three years. Along with the admission, Google also revealed that it planned to start offering encrypted search starting last week, following a similar move for Gmail.

“Earlier this year, we encrypted Gmail for all our users, and next week we will start offering an encrypted version of Google Search,” the post over the Wi-Fi issues revealed.

No other details have been unveiled, but it looks like the move had been hinted at before, earlier this week at the Google shareholder meeting. Google had been planning the feature for longer, but it’s unclear if the Street View mess up spurred the company to implement it sooner, or if the feature was already one of the things slated for release at the Google I/O 2010 developer conference next week.

Users will have the option to encrypt their searches on Google.com to protect them from nosy third-parties. Regular traffic transmitted over an open network can be easily intercepted and read by anyone with the means and will to do so. This problem is even greater over public Wi-Fi networks where basically anyone can listen in on the communications, as Google’s Street View problems have shown.

Using an https:// connection makes it significantly harder for others to eavesdrop. It is also a very widely used protocol, having been around since the early days of the Internet. However, it is only used by most services and sites during the login process or for sensitive communications. This is because it implies additional steps and more resources on the server side.

Google introduced a secure version of Gmail a couple of years ago. Earlier this year, Google rolled out secure connections for Gmail as the default. Users can still opt out, but by default, any communication with Gmail is done over https://. It’s unlikely that Google will make https:// connections default for the search engine.