[HTTPS-Everywhere] The DuckDuckGo search engine supplying HTTPS links

[Seth David Schoen]

mezzanine at Safe-mail.net writes:

> It appears that the DuckDuckGo search engine features HTTPS hyperlinks for
> certain sites in its search results. This includes at least one site which
> does not have an HTTPS Everywhere ruleset--searching for "sutter health"
> leads to https://myhealthonline.sutterhealth.org/ among the search results,
> so it is not clear as to whether the underlying mechanism used by the
> DuckDuckGo search is based on HTTPS Everywhere rulesets or merely includes
> mappings from HTTPS Everywhere rulesets among other sources or is completely
> unrelated. In some respects, for search engines to automatically supply HTTPS
> links could be useful for increasing the usage of HTTPS by users who do not
> have HTTPS Everywhere or similar plugins installed. (Perhaps the Google
> search engine could do things along these lines if they don't already do so.)

I think DuckDuckGo was using our rulesets at one time.  Perhaps they also
have another source of rulesets or heuristics that they could share.

I don't think Google is likely to do this in the general case, but I'll
bring it up with them.  (They could certainly do it in the case of the
sites on the Chromium HSTS preload list, if they aren't already doing so.)

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
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