Google are "updating" SafeSearch Options for admins - no more nossl?

[JSchlackman]

Google upblished a blog post today: An update to SafeSearch options for network administrators. The wording is pretty vague, but it sounds to me like they are retiring the nosslsearch.google.com option:

 

For some time, we’ve offered network administrators the ability to require the use of SafeSearch by their users, which filters out explicit content from search results; this is especially important for schools. However, using this functionality has meant that searches were sent over an unencrypted connection to Google. Unfortunately, this has been the target of abuse by other groups looking to snoop on people’s searches, so we will be removing it as of early December.

 

The documents that mentioned the nosslsearch CNAME have already been changed and now talk about using forcesafesearch.google.com instead, which, as the name suggests, will force SafeSearch to be always on. Of course, this means anyone using it will now be totally reliant on SafeSearch, and cannot use on-premises filtering unless they have SSL interception set up.