[curiousgal]

Most Third World governments control ISPs and DNS queries can be easily monitored but whether those are implicative or not depends on where the content embedded in the search results is hosted/served from.

Also, even if Google is fully HTTPS, if a query returns images hosted on unsecured websites, those urls will be plainly visible and hence implicative.

Edit: The embedded thumbnails are actually encrypted as pointed by the comment below.

[manufacturious]

I was curious and just checked -- until you click on an image in google's search results to see it fullsize in the semi-lightbox, you're actually getting the "thumbnail" sent from google as a b64 encoded string

[curiousgal]

Well, that's good news. thank you for checking, I stand corrected.

[luke-stanley]

I suspect it might just be represented that way in the browser, and that it's not sent that way.

[manufacturious]

Interesting thought, but wouldn't it kinda have to be done that way? Otherwise you'd see missing images on image SERPs, and you'd see the delay of thumbnails loading due to slower source servers.

[mkj]

Browsers doing url prefetching for top results would also leak some information?

[mamon]

So now we consider US to be Third World country? :)

[rosaldo]

wondered about the same thing