Google works hard to improve its search functions and make the overall user experience safe. Through the company’s efforts to design a securer search environment, private search and the war against bad ads have eliminated the downsides to using the biggest search engine in the world. Google unveiled an infographic to explain its work.
Similar to how poorly written custom content dilutes the internet, spammy and malicious Google Ads plague certain areas of the web. Within the last 12 months, Google has banned more than 224 million advertisements. Additionally, the search engine named approximately 889,000 advertisers as outlawed promoters and highlighted 223 countries for allowing poor ads to proliferate the web.
While Google organized a dedicated team to fight bad ads online, the company also worked hard to develop new Chrome security features. In a recent blog post on The Chromium Blog, Adam Langley, software engineer at Google, wrote that Chrome sends entered searches made by users signed into their accounts across Secure Sockets Layers (SSL). The latest Chrome 25 will perform the same function even for users not logged in to their Google accounts.
Langley goes on to explain that sending queries and content over SSL makes search a more secure and private experience. The function prevents third-party individuals from intercepting internet traffic information. Web pioneers like Gmail, Twitter and Facebook all serve content over SSL, while browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari have begun using encrypted search to protect queries. How does Chrome’s latest SSL transition affect users? Langley notes that searches may be slightly faster due to the browser’s new SPDY protocol.
As Search Engine Land contributor Vanessa Fox points out, secure search provides users with greater privacy, but it also prevents web marketers from gleaning actionable insight from incoming site traffic. If search information continues to become less tangible, SEO content strategies will struggle to get off the ground, as marketers won’t know what keywords to optimize or what customers visit branded websites for in the first place. This could encourage organizations to explore all content marketing avenues, publishing a wide array of media to speak to an audience who might refine their searches several times before landing on a site that meets their unique needs.
