The H-Online: Google has announced on its Inside Search blog that it is enabling SSL encryption by default on its global search pages. The US site Google.com has been switching users to the secured HTTPS protocol since last year and now, to improve security and privacy for all its users, the company is rolling the behavior out to its international properties such as google.co.uk.
As is the case on the US site, this only affects users who are signed into their Google account when visiting the site. The company expects to roll out this feature to the different local Google search pages “over the next few weeks”. Google hopes that this move will encourage other companies to adopt SSL more broadly across their web sites as well.