Google just launched an encrypted search portal which is a Godsend for people on public networks since there is a lot that can be gleaned from your search queries. For doing your protected searches, however, you have to go to a different portal which I linked to above. Now, the omnibar (the address bar in Google Chrome) also serves as a search box but searches on the normal google portal by default. Here is a simple, few seconds process to switch it over to encrypted search.

  1. Click on the wrench/tool icon at the top of Google Chrome and go to Options.

  2. On the “Basics” tab, go to the “Search” item and click on “Manage Search Engines”

  3. Go to the very bottom of the new page that opens and you will see three empty boxes.

  4. For the first box (leftmost), give any nickname for the engine. I gave “EncryptedGoogle”

  5. For second box, give a keyword that invokes the new search engine. I gave “encrypted.google.com”

  6. For last box, give the url for the search engine. This should be

https://encrypted.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

  1. Press Enter and the engine will be added to the list. Then hover over the engine row and click on “Make as default”. And you are done.

Happy safe searching :)