• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 21, 2010

Aiming to prevent users' search queries and results from interception, Google said Friday it is rolling out an encrypted version of its search service.

The beta offering, available at https://www.google.com won't return links to all features, including Image Search and Maps. Google additionally warns that searching on the encrypted site might take longer than on the non-encrypted one.

Google still retains its own logs tying IP addresses to search queries. "Searching over SSL doesn't reduce the data sent to Google -- it only hides that data from third parties who seek it," the company says.