The growth of HTTPS requests

Analysis
1

I am interested in working out if the number of requests over HTTPS have increased / decreased over the past few years and what trends I can associate with them. I’m using the following basic query to start off with:

  SELECT count(pageid) as NumberHttps, 'Nov-2010' as CreatedDate 
  FROM [httparchive:runs.2010_11_15_requests]  
  WHERE (url LIKE ("https%")) 
  GROUP BY CreatedDate

While this request works great, it doesn’t take into account redirects to HTTPS. For example, a site may have a URL of http://acme.com, but actually get redirected to https://acme.com.

I did have a look at the following question - http://bigqueri.es/t/how-many-https-websites-are-using-mixed-content/244, but wasnt sure if this is along the right lines!

Any advice would be appreciated!

2

That seems fine. I might use “count(requestid)” since the pageids are NOT unique.

One issue is the HTTP Archive assumes all the URLs start with “http://”, whereas all-ssl websites probably open in https:// (from Google Search, etc.). So the absolute # of HTTPS requests might not be too telling.

A better stat to track IMO would be the number of http websites that redirect to https.

3

Great - thanks for the response @stevesoudersorg!

Your suggestion does seem like a better approach. Out of interest - is that how the HTTP Archive calculates it on the trend page?

http://httparchive.org/trends.php#perHttps

4

The HTTP Archive just looks at https URLs over total URLs.

1 Like