According to the latest news, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) plans to reward the most secure websites. Google, the biggest search engine in whole of the world, said that it will give extra points to the web pages that are well encrypted, which in turn will improve the ratings and the ranking algorithms of those web pages. This way, the web pages will remain safe from hackers, who break into different web pages and steal the users’ confidential information.

The company, in a blog post, said that it hopes to have more web pages in the HTTPS protocol. It is pertinent to note here that HTTPS, unlike HTTP that is unsafe, refers to a secure digital communication.

It is, no doubt, one of the most bold and significant steps that the company has taken to improve the security of web pages, especially after the search engine became aware of the NSA’s (National Security Agency) snooping.

American Civil Liberties Union’s technologist, Christopher Soghoian, said that this is one of the most important deals for the web pages as it means that their rankings can be improved simply by the introduction of encryption.

When the web pages are encrypted, there emerges a barrier between the user and the person who wants to steal the confidential information. This way, the data of the users remains secured even if they use unsecured internet connections and Wi-Fi spots of public cafes and airports.

The co-founder and chief technology officer of Lookout Inc, a mobile security company, during a conference, said that people are more confident when they send their private information, such as their social security number and their credit card info, via a secured envelope instead of an unsecured one. He further commented that encrypted web pages are like a secure envelope for the users, which prevent their data from leakage and hacking.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) can use its search algorithm as an incentive or a deterrent for the practices prevailing among the web developers, since almost all the web developers have a desire to improve the ratings of their pages. For instance, the web pages and websites that take more time to load are penalized through low search rankings, whereas the ones that load quickly are given a boost in the search results. In fact, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) uses almost 200 pointers to decide the rankings of the websites. Mr. Mahaffey of Lookout Inc. said that this is similar to the way different commodities are ranked. He gave the example of a car, whose overall ratings boost up due to the presence of airbags in it. Similarly, a site’s overall ratings go up when they use encrypted data.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) recently announced that it has been using encryption as a pointer for a couple of months, and up till now, around 1 percent of the search results have been affected because of this signal. The company plans on increasing the weight that it gives to ‘encryption’ metric over time.

The web developers, more often than not, avoid encrypting their websites due to the encryption costs. Not to mention the fact that encryption also slows down the loading speed of a website. However, Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) itself uses encryption while sending the emails through G-mail account. So, the chances are that the web developers will respond to this incentive, which in turn will improve the web security all around the globe.

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