Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fiaxhs | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that the !g bang redirects you to encrypted.google.com, it's more secure but results are often different from a regular www.google.com search. It bugged me for a while not knowing why some queries returned unusual results. ( more here https://duck.co/forum/thread/2880/remove-the-encrypted-subdo... )

View on HN

www.google.com uses encryption too these days.

You are linking to a ~5 year old thread that is discussing the state of things well before google switched everything over to ssl.

For a while I believe the difference was specifically that encrypted.google.com exclusively used PFS SSL cipher suites

> linking to encrypted.google.com not only is not necessary but it prevents local search results from being displayed. e.g. no google.ro search results, only google.com

I can only see this as a good thing. If I want local search results, I'll add local qualifiers like "USA", "Texas", "Houston"

That was an odd one to read, being in Houston. I thought somehow you added wildcards that were auto filled with the users location, I then realized that I'm an idiot.

You could also do searches for yourself like "Stefan" and "Theard" and even type your password in like "* * * * * * * *".

A lot of JavaScript things have been buggy for me with encrypted.google.com as well. For example the Google timer cards and such often just won't start at all, while they'll work fine on the regular google.com.

It's a sad fact that regular google results are sometimes better than encrypted.google.com. It is like regular google knows what "I" want.

The difference isn't the encryption, but the fact that Google tracks your searches to give you "better" results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com