This is the usual privacy hysteria knee-jerk reaction: "Watch out, the big companies are going to get data on you!".
And people are going to react exactly like they've done before: if the service is worth it, they'll be happy to trade a few bits of privacy about themselves in exchange for the benefits.
Also, I'm not sure the author of this piece understands what encryption is about since he laments that most people don't search with https on. Er... what? If you want Google to search something on your behalf, they have to be able to read the words you type. Encrypting these words so Google can't read them would be comically useless.
And people are going to react exactly like they've done before: if the service is worth it, they'll be happy to trade a few bits of privacy about themselves in exchange for the benefits.
Also, I'm not sure the author of this piece understands what encryption is about since he laments that most people don't search with https on. Er... what? If you want Google to search something on your behalf, they have to be able to read the words you type. Encrypting these words so Google can't read them would be comically useless.