I’ve just read about Google’s new “secure” encrypted version of its search engine Google.com. To use the new encrypted you should login to https://www.google.com/ website. If you haven’t noticed, the difference between the non-SSL version is the ’s’ after the “http”, which means that the connection is encrypted using the SSL technology.
What is means is that the data that is being sent from the client browser to Google’s servers is encrypted, in order to prevent other people from snooping on the data which is being passed. The secured version of Google search engine is currently in beta stage, and it covers only the web search, not image and other related Google search engine varieties and domains. Google has also reported that the search might be slower from what we are used to, because of the encryption that is taken place before submitting the information to Google’s remote servers.
People who are concerned about security and privacy when using the search engine, can now be sure that the data that is passed between the browser and Google’s servers will be totally secured and know one but them, can see their search queries.
In terms of web analytics data mining, there might be a problem. I mean that web analytics applications that are being used on websites, can no longer be able to mine the referrer data, including the keywords that were being used to refer to the website, which the web analytics JavaScript tracker code was being implemented to gather that specific data.
I have personally tried using several web analytics solutions in order to see if those web analytics solution can recognize the the keywords and referrer data that was sent (or was not sent) to my website using the https://www.google.com search engine, and for my surprise, the referrer data was missing. That means that the web analytics tracker couldn’t recognize the referrer and therefore that relevant keywords that the user has put in the secured Google search engine.
If Google will decide to make the encrypted search engine a default one, or maybe put a link to enable secured search option at the top of the page, many website will probably suffer from the lack important referrer information that is used to analyze the data for better search engine optimization and marketing decisions.
I want to hear you opinion about Google’s new SSL secured search engine, and what is your experience with the new version of Google.com beta encrypted search engine.
More information about Google’s secured search engine can be found on Google Blog.
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