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About SSL and HTTPS vs where should search engines rank knowledge for human kind

2018/6/17 – We use opendns.com to set appropriate contents coming to our home.   There was one time out of curiosity we search if any category people would want to categorize outdoorstirfry.com to.   This link https://domain.opendns.com/outdoorstirfry.com gives the outcome as of today:

People think that our web site provides valuable information for research/reference, i.e., general knowledge for human kind.   It is our long belief that human knowledge should be made public and as low cost as possible.   If you ever read how outdoorstirfry.com came around by reading our “About Us” article at https://outdoorstirfry.com/?page_id=1365, you would know that we came to business because of various cost issues, for example paying the government for maintaining the patents.   It is always our goal of keeping the cost minimum such that our customer and general public can access our knowledge at the lowest cost.    Now we are pushed by search engines like Google and our web hosting vendor to increase cost by providing SSL/HTTPS, we do sincerely hope that search engines can differentiate what is for human kind knowledge and what is for business purpose.    And it is our belief that providing human kind knowledge should always rank higher than any commercial information no matter the knowledge is rendered by SSL/HTTPS or not.

2018/6/1 – We have been notified by our hosting vendor that Google will start to downgrade any web site that does not do SSL/HTTPS.    As for now and ever our web site will not do secure transaction.   All purchases from our web site are directed to the secure Paypal web site.   In this way our customer’s private financial data is actually handled and secured by Paypal not by us.   We feel this is the best way as we like to be open in our information while only protecting (securing) private financial data as necessary.

We have a long term commitment in the web site hosting with our vendor.   We have investigated into the cost of scraping this long term contract and modifying by adding this SSL/HTTPS feature onto our web site.  We feel the cost is a bit pricey at this time.   We might do it sometime in the future.

If you have strong opinion about what we need to do in either direction, please fill out our contact form here to let us know.