I'm about to try / play with Google's SSL search. From what I've read, it got positive reactions, at least at Berkeley's policy blog: "a small step but in the right direction". "Google will know your search terms, but they will be obscured from other people who might want to snoop upon you (think jealous spouses, your ISP, and especially, your employer). The service also disables referrers."
It should be interesting to see how it works - and how it doesn't work.
I've been observing my blogs' visitors' visiting patterns with different counters (here's this blog's privacy disclosure, which if I was serious about I would have put a note at the top of this blog that visitors are tracked by country and IP address). IP tracking is often inaccurate, in estimating the visitor's geographic location, especially for places outside the US, and there's less agreement between the various counters I've tried in the visitors' patterns that they have captured. One of them is Google Analytics, on which I've given up because it seems to be missing visitors more often that not. Statcounter, a semi-free tracker that I'm trying now seems to be doing a more accurate job, but it doesn't miss the same visitors that google's analytics misses (and vice versa). Could be because visitors may have opted out of google analytics, but as far as I can tell from the, say, three to five people in the www that have been reading my blog consistently, their geographic location from the IP tracking is way off. Which makes for amusing headaches - is my mom googling me online? She's not supposed to. Then why is her city showing up as a visitor through google search nonetheless? I know about zero people from her place that would care to look me up online.
So, I'm curious to see what the SSL-edited settings will yield.