Earlier today I was at Which Wich with my Cr-48, but using Freebird’s WiFi. I didn’t have a problem with browsing the web, because most of my stuff was through Google Services and was over SSL. Everything except Search itself.

I started poking around to see what happens if you force https on a Google Search, and it turns out you’re redirected to:

https://encrypted.google.com

Then I wondered how to make this my default search engine without the use of plugins. It turns out it’s very simple.

1. Do a Google Search using the above URL, and you’ll notice the basic format is: https://encrypted.google.com/search?<insert-a-bunch-of-parameters>&q=<query>. We are just interested in the bolded part of that fake URL: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=<query>
2. In Chrome OS, click the Wrench menu, click Options, then go to Basics and find the Search section. Click on Manage search engines… button.
3. You’ll get a window with all the Search Engines that your Chrome OS knows about. At the bottom of the “Other search engines” list, you’ll see a row for adding a new search engine.
1. In “Add a new search engine“, put something like: Google SSL
2. In “Keyword“, put something like: encrypted.google.com
3. In “URL with %s in place of query“, put the URL we made from above: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%s
4. Hit Enter.
4. Hover over the newly created search engine entry, and click Make Default when the button appears over the URL column.
5. Then try out a new search in the Omnibox and it should be SSL’d through Google’s SSL Beta search service.

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