ixquick is a UK base metasearch site which collates the results from other search engines (including Google). It's related to the American startpage.com, which used to be simply another name for ixquick but is now just a front end for Google.

I'm no apologist for Google (especially after reading about Why James Whittaker left Google) but parasiting off other search engines cannot be a good long term arrangement for the internet as a whole. If everybody did it then the real search engines would run out of revenue.

Just before Google started up (yes I do remember back that far) there were Yahoo!, altavista and about a dozen others, and then I started using meta-crawler, which was possibly the original meta-search site, but though it looked like a good idea at the time, its results were poor and when Google came along it was far better.

Google's nemesis, which really destroyed its culture, was Facebook. In case you thought facebook was a social networking site, it's really an advertising medium that known FAR TOO MUCH about the people it's targeting with adverts, far more than Google will ever know about its users.

I'm not sure that using https with Google will help with those sites containing your search terms, unless all your traffic is really being intercepted by a third party, in which case you've got a different problem.