Expanding of Google Transparency Report: a strong indication in favour of switching to HTTPS

Google has announced the expansion of its Transparency Report project. The report has a new section to check progress on the implementation of encryption - both on Google and on some of the most visited sites online. The aim of this project is improving the overall security across the web.

What was included in the new report

Sites owned by Google

The report contains the progress on the implementation of HTTPS across Google. In the past year the company has already introduced HTTPS for Gmail, Drive and search. This year, HTTPS support also appeared in Blogger and Ads.

As shown in the news on Google's official blog, the number of requests to the company servers via HTTPS has grown from 50% in January 2014 to 75% in March 2016.

Google plans to gradually transfer other products to HTTPS.

Popular third-party sites

The report also includes data on the HTTP-connections of the largest network resources that are not linked with Google. Sites were selected on the basis of publicly available Alexa data and Google's internal statistics. With Google data, sites presented in the report cover approximately 25% of all traffic on the network.

Certificate Transparency

The Google report also includes a tool to view Certificate Transparency - a special log, which records information on issued certificates. With help from a convenient interface, anyone can view data on all issued SSL-certificates for specific domains.

If the certificate was issued for the domain by trusted authority, then the record will be represented in the Certificate Transparency log. You can see which certificates have been issued for this host name, including the expired certificates and certificates for subdomains of that host.

Google also said that they are making efforts to support the transition of the global web to HTTPS. Google representatives are encouraging the transition to HTTPS: HTTPS sites get more benefits in the rankings compared to HTTP sites. To take advantage of a secure connection, it is enough to get any SSL-certificate.

Transparency Report, illustrating the large-scale transition to HTTPS - another indication from Google that it is time to buy an SSL-certificate for your site. If you still have not done so, it is best to do it sooner rather than later, otherwise you risk being left behind by technological progress.