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Google kills egalitarianism on the web

Google has decided to change the way it ranks websites.

In its infinite wisdom, the search engine giant has decided to give a higher ranking to those sites which dish up their content using HTTPS encryption rather than in plain unencrypted form.

The rationale behind this is that such sites are far less vulnerable to hacking and therefore pose less of a risk to users.

Now that might sound just fine and dandy -- but it does create a rather worrying gulf between the haves and have-nots, at least in respect to whether you can afford a signed certificate or not.

Yes, you can self-sign your https server connection but, someone correct me if I'm wrong, most browsers will still warn you that the site doesn't have an authenticated (trusted) certificate -- and that's going to scare away a great many neophyte websurfers.

Perhaps browsers will soon (if they don't already) stop popping up a warning screen for self-signed sites or website operators will be faced with the choice of either risking a lower ranking or potentially scaring people away.

Perhaps, if Google was to remain true to its "do no evil" mantra, it should give people the option of ranking secure connections ahead of regular http connections when performing a search -- rather than just skewing the relevance of results based on the page's encryption status.

I also wonder if Google's claimed attempts to make the web safer by way of this move might backfire. When people are told that https connections are less likely to cause harm to their computers by dumping malware, they may believe it. This opens the door to any would-be ELS (evil little sod) who wants to set up a raft of self-signed sites that are designed to dump malware on visitors' computers. These sites will be ranked ahead of non-encrypted (but probably quite safe) sites that are also included in the search results.

Duh Google... what are you doing?

It strikes me that the biggest effect of this ranking change will be to place commercial sites ahead of non-commercial ones. It's mainly business/commerce sites that have, need and can afford to have a signed certificate and use https connections. The average non-commercial website will be forced to ante-up a big fist-full of dollars for such a certificate or be relegated to the second division of search results.

Has Google lost its way?

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