Google To Enable HTTPS For International Search Users In The Coming Weeks

HTTPS has been the default protocol for the past months for users connecting to the google.com website. Google switched to https on by default last year, from previously offering https connections as an option in the search settings. Web users who load http://www.google.com/ in a browser will notice that they are automatically redirected to the https version of the site. The idea here is to improve the overall security of the connection, and to eliminate eavesdropping and traffic snooping attacks while using the service.

Google users previously had the option to turn off https in the search engine, but Google since then has removed the option so that every google.com user is now using the https protocol to connect to Google.

Google a week ago in the company's official Inside Search blog has announced that https will be rolled out to all international search properties of the company.

We’re now ready to expand this protection, so over the next few weeks we will begin introducing SSL search beyond google.com to our local domains around the globe. As before, we hope that these efforts to expand the use of SSL encryption in our services motivate other companies to adopt SSL more broadly.

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International users can currently open the https version of their localized Google search engine, say google.in directly by entering https://www.google.in/ whenever they want to access it. This is a manual process though, which in the coming weeks will be replaced by an automatic redirect. From that moment on it does not really matter if google.in, http://google.in/ or https://google.in/ are entered, as they all lead to the https version of the site.

It is unlikely that users will notice any issues with the protocol change. The best way to test that is to connect to the https version of Google Search right now to see if it does.

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