I don't really understand why the Google searches are 'secure' now? What are they 'secure' from?
I'm not logged into Google.
Try doing a google search for any "politically sensitive" topic in china. China iirc is now blocking google entirely, so they can do full-scale censorship with their baida or whatever they call it, the national search engine.
But for countries that aren't
blocking google, you may not want to be using it unencrypted to do searches for things that your local dictator/president4life doesn't want you to know about. Cisco and others are making all sorts of deep packet inspectors, and are all too happy to wholesale them to retailers that make a killing selling this restricted tech under the table to repressive governments.
So when just doing a
search for things like "what really happened in neighboringcity?" gets you drug off to the local station for questioning, ya... I'd want to use https too. Problem is, if it's not the default, they could get more serious with me for no reason other than I'm using https for my searches. ("what are you hiding?") Google is just going to move to make it mandatory now, so the enforcers don't use your voluntary use of https search as an excuse to put you under the microscope. It's a great move to protect random people all over the world really.