Google has announced they have exerted a major investment — which includes strong SSL encryption by default — and created “Project Zero” to make sure its services use leading security protocols, resulting to an automatic safe connection to Search, Gmail and Google Drive and secure access to websites.

HTTPS_Everywhere_logo

The HTTPS Everywhere logo (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The company has recently created “Project Zero”, a new, well-staffed team formed from interested “Googlers” who have spent their time doing research for safer Internet.

“Project Zero is our contribution, to start the ball rolling. Our objective is to significantly reduce the number of people harmed by targeted attacks. We’re hiring the best practically-minded security researchers and contributing 100% of their time toward improving security across the Internet,” Google said on a statement.

In part of creating the Project Zero, Google has also announced intensifying the support for “HTTPS Everywhere”.

During the Google I/O 2014 few months ago, Google has called for “HTTPS Everywhere”, a free web browser extension formed from the collaboration by The Tor Project and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the leading nonprofit organisation defending civil liberties in the digital world, promoting protected freedom and rights throughout the development of technology.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a communication protocol for secure connection over computer networks, protecting a user from eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks.

“We’ve seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging,” Google stated.

“For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.”

Google said they are encouraging all website owners to switch to HTTPS from HTTP to heighten security for everyone.

Preparing plans for the coming weeks, Google has promised it’ll announce detailed best practices to make the switch easier, and to avoid common mistakes.

Test your HTTPS website’s security level here: SSL Server Test