Interesting report over at the WSJ noting that some at Google are considering if they should boost the search results for sites that are encrypted as an attempt to encourage more widespread use of encryption. I would be a bit surprised if the company did this, as Google always claims that it’s focus is entirely on the quality of the content of sites, and delivering people to what they’re looking for. While the search algorithms do take into account things like page load time, it seems like encryption status might not be seen as a real indicator of quality. Still, I hope that Google does seriously consider such a move, because it could (very quickly) drive many more sites to encrypt — and, it would probably (finally) drive more services that refuse to make encryption work to figure it out. For example, almost no media sites will do full encryption because it would effectively break most ad networks. So, for most media properties, going full encryption automatically means taking a huge hit in ad revenue. The various ad networks could do things to fix this, but very few of them seem interested (actually, very few of them seem to even understand the issue). If Google were to make this change, then the pressure coming from media properties (many of whom live and die based on their Google rankings) to ad networks to figure this out, would hopefully be enough to create a real shift.
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