Encrypted Google

There are a few ways of doing this. The first is HTTPS Everywhere which is a Firefox add-on. The second is to edit the google.xml file yourself. This file can be found (on Slackware at least) in /usr/lib/firefox-x.y.z/searchplugins/. Then open the file as root (or with sudo) with your favorite editor, e.g.,

sudo vim /usr/lib/firefox-x.y.z/searchplugins/google.xml

In lines 6 and 7, you’ll see that the search plugin is issuing GET requests to Google. You can change these so that they look something like this:

template="https://suggestqueries.google...",
template="https://www.google.com/search">

for lines 6 and 7 (respectively). I believe either will ensure the fact that Mozilla receives the proper credit for someone searching using firefox.

Update

Upon further review, this seems to break the suggestions feature. That said, you should weigh the benefits of encrypted search versus unencrypted search and if you find yourself missing that feature, you can just edit that file again to make them use plain Google.