Google announced today that it was moving domains for its encrypted search from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com . In May Google launched an encrypted version of its Web search, allowing users to enable a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to encrypt their information as they searched. Sponsor As ReadWriteWeb reported , this move ran afoul of some school districts’ web filtering requirements, forcing them to possibly block access to other parts of the Google secure domain. Today’s move was a response to educators’ concerns, says Google, noting in the announcement that “if school network administrators decide to block encrypted searches, the blocking will no longer affect Google authenticated services like Google Apps for Education.” Discuss

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Opscode , a cloud infrastructure automation company, announced today that it has closed an $11 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Battery Ventures and brings the total raised for the company to $13.5 million. Proceeds from the new funds will be used to expand the company’s engineering staff, research initiatives, and sales and marketing efforts. Sponsor “We are witnessing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make world-class IT infrastructure available to the masses,” says Sunil Dhaliwal, a general partner at Battery Ventures and now a member of Opscode’s Board of Directors. “The future belongs to those that can deliver simple, scalable automation to any IT user, regardless of their size or sophistication.” Opscode is the maker of Chef, an open source systems integration framework for managing and scaling infrastructure. Chef allows developers to manage large-scale server and application deployment by writing code, rather than by running commands by hand. Chef helps automate some of the manual tasks that have historically been required to fix server issues. Opscode also announced today a limited beta release of Opscode Platform, a hosted configuration management service. The Opscode Platform is a centrally managed data store into which servers publish data such as IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, and OS versions. According to Opscode, Chef and the Opscode Platform allow developers and systems engineers to fully automate their infrastructures with re-usable code – without having to build or maintain systems management tools. Opscode was founded in 2008 and is based in Seattle, Washington. Since its launch, over 150 individuals and 25 companies, including Rackspace and RightScale have contributed to the open source project. Discuss

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Amazon Web Services announced today that their AWS Import/Export service to help move data in and out of Amazon S3 would be more widely available. The service was launched in a limited beta in May, and today opens to anyone, along with an API and a web interface so that customers can check on the status of their data transfer. Sponsor AWS Import/Export accelerates transferring large amounts of data between the AWS cloud and portable storage devices. These storage devices are mailed to Amazon, bypassing an Internet upload in order to use Amazon’s internal high-speed network to move the data. As Amazon notes, the Internet is insufficient for the transfer of large data sets, and even with a mail-in service, Amazon claims its “Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.” As Amazon noted when it announced the service, “it would take over 80 days to upload just 1TB of data over a T1 connection.” The service costs $80 per storage device handled, along with a $2.49 per data-loading-hour fee. Storage devices are returned to the owner after transfer. Data portability continues to be a concern around cloud computing, and the AWS Import/Export service is a step towards addressing this. But the fact that mailing data to Amazon proves faster than uploading it points to another area that still needs to be addressed: how our broadband capabilities can keep up with our data processing needs. Discuss

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Streaming real-time search company Collecta announced today that it has secured additional funding, to the tune of $4.7 million, from Dace Ventures . Previous investors, including True, have already invested $1.85 million. The company delivers streaming news, via widgets, APIs and its Site Search Platform, to partners. It intends to use the infusion to build out its team and establish more partnerships, according to Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell. Past partnerships have included CNET’s coverage of the iPad launch and the MySpace’s Today on MySpace feature. Sponsor “We’ve got a solid team and have spent time building a scalable infrastructure,” Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell told us in a phone conversation. “Now, Collecta is more than a great idea. We understand the business behavior of our users and we’ll be building out a full-fledged business.” Campbell anticipates adding personnel in business development, program management and ad sales. The latter because one of the major initiatives on deck is the creation of a full-fledged advertising system. ReadWriteWeb mentioned in previous coverage that when we tested Collecta , the news it streamed from 15 million content sources was in fact less than a minute old. We also noted that the company had made its widget freely available for anyone to use in their websites. Collecta says that 60% of queries it sees come in via its partner API. OneRiot , its main competitor, says it sees 97% of its queries that way. Collecta is notable because they form explicit partnerships with publishers, such as WordPress, and stream their content into the index in real time. OneRiot focuses more on P2P indexing with the use of their installed toolbar and indexing Twitter & Digg. They also recently launched an ad network. Real-time searches also tend to shy away from many normal search parameters. Big on entertainment and very low on porn. Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of Collecta . ReadWriteWeb’s real-time web coverage is here. Disclosure: In addition to announcing a new round of funding, Collecta is also an event sponsor of this week’s Real-Time Web Summit . Discuss

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Google announced today that it has enabled a Google Maps preview in both Gmail and Google Buzz. Now, instead of pasting a Google Map into an email you send, any Google Maps URL and any U.S. address (for the time being) you enclose will automatically come with a map embedded. Sponsor To enable the function in your Gmail, click the Google Labs setting tab and select “Google Maps previews in mail.” Once that is functional, any Google Maps URL will be mapped. For the time being, only U.S. addresses are being extracted, but, according to Google software engineer, Mark Knichel, they are working on giving the extraction process a global reach. When it comes to Google Buzz, pasting a Google Maps link into the post box will cause the system to automatically produce an image preview of that location. Discuss

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