Which terminates on the other side where everything is plaintext again. https is a transport level protocol, so it protects you from people (trivially) snooping on your data in transit but anybody at google with enough clearance has access to that data.

If that's what you are worried about then it seems like you'd have trouble using the internet in general.

I'm not worried, it's just that the gggp of this comment mentioned that search history is protected by a password and so it 'should be safe from prying eyes.'

All I did was point out that that data is stored on a server somewhere else and that there are lots of eyes that could be prying there.

I'm sure that there are plenty of people that are concerned about their internet use being monitored, for instance, dissidents and other people that have legitimate reasons to be afraid of having their search history lifted in the future.

Interesting reading on the subject of subpoenas of search records:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5165854

The less information that is being held on you by third parties the less chance that one day you'll be part of some drag-net operation.

Any website that you use could store all kinds of data about you without even telling you. Not to mention your ISP, who knows everything! At least Google is making it clear via Google History that they do have the means to do it.

https should stop your ISP from spying, no?

Assuming no MITM attack, yes. Of course they can still see what hosts you're connecting to for your HTTPS sessions, just not the content going back and forth.