As you might already know, all information that is passed over the Internet and it is not encrypted can be viewed by anyone (with the knowledge). The only way to secure your data and your privacy is with SSL encryption, also known as HTTPS. Google will force logged in users to use secured searching by redirecting to https://www.google.com and then back to http://www.google.com after logging out. One letter can make the difference, the extra ‘s’ means privacy and secured searching. Google was testing this feature for a while through https://encrypted.google.com which is still in beta.
This is good news for (Google) users, they can search for any terms they want without the fear of the big brother watching. Of course Google still knows what keywords you search because it is the one that gives you the results. But the sites that you will visit they will not know what you have searched to find them. These are all good news but what about webmasters who use web analytics services (such as Google analytics)?
Users visiting the website through Google search will (still) be recognized as coming from Google organic search but the query terms they used to find the website will not be visible. For webmasters this was an invaluable information and it will affect them negatively. For now this will not be a big problem as most of the users don’t use the encrypted searching but in the next months this will change.
Source: [Google Analytics Blog]