18 October

When you search on Google over https on Wi-Fi in a café or a train station, your search terms and results page are encrypted in transit, so others on the same network cannot see them. On 18 October 2011, Google announced on its official blog that users signed in to a Google Account would be redirected to HTTPS on google.com over the following weeks, noting that this matters especially on unsecured connections such as an internet café's Wi-Fi. Google's 2010 blog post says encrypted search does not reduce the data sent to Google but only hides it from third parties, and the 2011 announcement adds that clicking an ad still passes the search query to the advertiser. In mainland China, 16 of the censorship monitor GreatFire's last 17 conclusive tests, up to 8 October 2026, could not reach www.google.com, while an undated page on Baidu's webmaster platform says its whole site runs on HTTPS. Elsewhere in Asia, readers do not need to change any settings to search Google, and according to the Chrome team's announcement, from Chrome 154 in October 2026 the browser asks by default before opening a public site without HTTPS.