Google has recently admitted the extent of the encryption it uses in its search engine to protect its web traffic from hackers in all its online activities.
Based on company statistics released on Tuesday, this encryption protects 77 percent of the search requests being received and sent from all over the world to the data centers of Google, an increase from the 52 percent encryption it had at the end of 2013,
This figure covers all of the services supplied by Google, except the You Tube video site, which is being used by more than 1 billion people. The search giant is planning to include You Tube to its encryption list at the end of 2016.
"Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the Web even safer for everyone," Tim Willis and Rutledge Chin Feman wrote on the company's security blog. They are both strong advocates of HTTPS.
Over 75 percent of search requests to the servers of the search giant use encrypted connections and the company updates that data every week to reflect the progress made on its own services.
"We've long offered Gmail, Drive and Search over HTTPS, and in the last year, we've begun to add traffic from more products, like ads and Blogger as well," stated Willis and Feman. "We're making positive strides, but we still have a ways to go," they added.
Encryption is important because it is a security measure that scrambles transmitted data to make it unintelligible if it is intercepted by a third party.
The search giant started focusing on this protective measure after confidential documents were leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a former NSA whistleblower. That scandal exposed the US government's activities that allegedly stole personal information of online users being coursed through the internet.
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