I have just been talking to a friend of mine who works for Google. I have asked him to talk to his superiors on the prospect of Google implementing an SSL version of their search pages.
This would be a great move by Google and would win them huge Kudos in the current climate not to mention it would be beneficial to them as well. By sending search requests over SSL they would be making it more difficult for their competitors (people like Phorm) to build profiles for targeted advertising.
Google could advertise it with something like "Google now offers secure searching!".
I really think it would be a great move for them.
My friend is going to talk to some of his colleagues and get back to me.
I am also going to contact Kim Cameron who wrote an article
here, to field the idea of MSN search also offering SSL capability for the same reasons as Google.
I will try and find someone at Yahoo! as well.
Alexander Hanff