Yahoo will start encrypting all traffic that goes from users to the Yahoo servers starting in early 2014. This will inevitably include search data and keywords, and users will be able to opt out of the encryption.
In a recent blog post, Marissa Mayer revealed the news.
This is all due to the recent issues with the NSA, and the fact that the organization recently got access to Yahoo user data.
If you take a look at the following screen capture below, you will see a sample from my web analytics of someone who has searched from Google using Google’s ecrypted search and then right below you’ll see what Yahoo is showing as an encrypted search. Frankly, today is the first time I have seen Yahoo start encrypting their searches. I have not seen any visits from Yahoo where they keyword search was encrypted.
