• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 17, 2015

On a message board, Reddit announced that it would soon start encrypting all searches by default. The news follows Microsoft Bing, which made a similar announcement this week.

Reddit will more closely protect user privacy and security by switching to HTTPS by default starting on June 29.

Google, Facebook and Yahoo have also opted to encrypt by default along with last week's newcomer Wikipedia. Google last year said it had begun considering HTTPS as a ranking signal in its search results.

Reddit already supports HTTPS, since last year, but not by default. "Nearly 1 year ago we gave you the ability to view reddit completely over SSL," Ricky Ramirez wrote in a post. "Now we're ready to enforce that everyone use a secure connection with reddit."

Since Ramirez made the announcement the message board has been stuffed with a barrage of questions, from using SSL to complying with OAuth best practices.

Wikipedia announcement to encrypt all sites came Friday. "We're happy to announce that we are in the process of implementing HTTPS to encrypt all Wikimedia traffic, wrote Yana Welinder, Victoria Baranetsky, and Brandon Black in a post. "We will also use HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to protect against efforts to 'break' HTTPS and intercept traffic. With this change, the nearly half a billion people who rely on Wikipedia and its sister projects every month will be able to share in the world’s knowledge more securely."