Mullvad's privacy-focused search engine Leta is now free for all users | Leta acts as a proxy for Google and Brave search results
Mullvad's privacy-focused search engine Leta is now free for all users | Leta acts as a proxy for Google and Brave search results
At launch, access to Mullvad Leta was restricted to users with a paid Mullvad VPN account, but it is now free and open to all.
Mullvad Leta has been audited by Assured.
Just a heads up, some of the details in the FAQ and Terms of Service seem a bit outdated and might not be accurate anymore.
Some relevant information from their FAQ section is as follows:
What can I do with Leta?
Leta is a search engine. You can use it to return search results from many locations. We provide text search results, currently we do not offer image, news or any other types of search result. Leta acts as a proxy to Google and Brave search results. You can select which backend search engine you wish to use from the homepage of Leta.
Can I use Leta as my default search engine?
Yes, so long as your browser supports changing default search engines.
Navigate to https://leta.mullvad.net/ in your browser and right-click on the URL bar.
From there you should see Add “Mullvad Leta“ with the Mullvad VPN logo to the left.
If you do not see this, you can attempt to add a custom search engine to your browser with:
- The name set to: Leta
- The URL set to: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%25s
You can select which backend engine to use as follows:
- Google: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%25s&engine=google
- Brave: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%25s&engine=brave
Did you make your own search engine from scratch?
We did not, we made a front end to the Google and Brave Search APIs.
Our search engine performs the searches on behalf of our users. This means that rather than using Google or Brave Search directly, our Leta server makes the requests.
Searching by proxy in other words.
What is the point of Leta?
Leta aims to present a reliable and trustworthy way of searching privately on the internet.
However, Leta is useless as a service if you use the perfect non-logging VPN, a privacy focussed DNS service, a web browser that resists fingerprinting, and correlation attacks from global actors. Leta is also useless if your browser blocks all cookies, tracking pixels and other tracking technologies.
For most people Leta can be useful, as the above conditions cannot ever truly be met by systems that are available today.
What is a cached search?
We store every search in a RAM based cache storage (Redis), which is removed after it reaches over 30 days in age.
Cached searches are fetched from this storage, which means we return a result that can be from 0 to 30 days old. It may be the case that no other user has searched for something during the time that you search, which means you would be shown a stale result.
What happens to everything I search for?
Your searches are performed by proxy, it is the Leta server that makes calls to the Google or Brave Search API.
Each search that has not already been cached is saved in RAM for 30 days. The idea is that the more searches performed, the larger and more substantial the cached results become, therefore aiding with privacy.
All searches will be stored hashed with a secret in a cache. When you perform a search the cache will be checked first, before determining whether a direct call to Google or Brave Search should be made. Each time the Leta application is restarted (due to an upgrade, or new version) server side, a new secret hash is generated, meaning that all previous search queries are no longer visible to Leta
What could potentially be a unique search would become something that many other users would also search for.
What is running on the server side?
We run the Leta servers on STBooted RAM only servers, the same as our VPN servers. These servers run the latest Ubuntu LTS, with our own stripped down custom Mullvad VPN kernel which we tune in-house to remove anything unnecessary for the running system.
The cached search results are stored in an in-memory Redis key / value store.
The Leta service is a NodeJS based application that proxies requests to Google or Brave Search, or returns them from cache.
We gather metrics relating to the number of cached searches, vs direct searches, solely to understand the value of our service.
Additionally we gather information about CPU usage, RAM usage and other such information to keep the service running smoothly.
I respect the effort of creating this search engine and the effort to create a good privacy focused browser. However I didn't appreciate the fact that the latest update to the browser set this search engine as the default.
I cannot help but respect any organization that has “here are the conditions that make our product useless” in their FAQ.
It’s an effective way to describe what their proxy does, for sure. It’s just nice to read public-facing text that doesn’t feel sanitized by committee.
It's also underselling what they are providing.
You get to skip all the AI garbage, all the sponsored links, and the "what other people are asking" sections and just go straight to the search results.
Privacy is the primary selling point, but the clean "old school" google interface is what I'm really excited about. I've set my default search in the browser to Leta for now.
I'd rather let some EU company like Qwant use my anonymized data, to hopefully someday build their own index, than use Google by proxy (except when neccessary, of course).
Good news, they are doing just that (in cooperation with Ecosia)
Edit: And it is supposed to be released this year (as early as Q1 apparently) https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/
Mojeek (UK-based) is trying. I wasn't super impressed by their index yet, though.
It seems like a good alternative so some of the most popular engines. I think I'll stick with Ecosia, since on top of being EU based, they also make the world a better place.
Mullvad is Swedish
I've been paying for Mullvad for a while and didn't realize this was even a thing until this announcement.
So SearXNG?
SearXNG
Always wondered how the fuck I'm supposed to say that.
Seeks'nn'jnn?
Sur X N G?
Search engine?Search'ng?
Searching. XNG makes the "ch" then "ng" sound in some languages.
Thus Searx was "Search"
@Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
@sibachian@lemmy.ml
@AnotherPenguin@programming.dev
@catloaf@lemm.ee
@fatboy93@lemm.ee @Sturgist@lemmy.caProbably the last one, I guess it's kinda like nginx
I pronounce it like it's spelled, searksng.
I just say that as SearchesNG
@Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
@sibachian@lemmy.ml
@AnotherPenguin@programming.dev
@catloaf@lemm.ee
@fatboy93@lemm.eeSo....I guess it kinda seems like a .gif vs .gif sorta situation, we'll never come to a consensus, there will forever be disparate camps chuckling under their breath at all the "idiots" that can't even pronounce SearXNG right...the fools.....
Well, guess I'll sleep on it and join a camp some day.... le sigh
Someone explain to be why this is better than using DDG or Qwant or SearX?
'Better' is relative :) is it better than using something like SearXNG? No. But for those people who insist on using Google, its better to do a proxied search than a first-hand one. Mullvad are European, are one of the very few orgs I personally think are trustable and have shown no signs of enshittification, Leta has been audited by a 3rd party - for those looking for a private Google experience this is about the best there is.
Finding a searxng instance and entering a random search term, the first 10 pages of results all came from google.
Checking the preferences, there were 4 search, and 6 of the other toggles enabled.
Even enabling all engines and rerunning the search, the first 13 results were listed as google
Is it meaningfully different from this offering if all the results it picks seemingly come from Google?
If I disable all but mojeek and qwant, all the results came from mojeek
I wonder if they're using the (paid) Google and Brave APIs, and are running Leta as a loss leader, or if they have some way to get around it
Surely it has to be the paid APIs. You can't build a service hoping Google won't notice your bots running searches.
The Leta FAQ confirms this:
Did you make your own search engine from scratch? We did not, we made a front end to the Google and Brave Search APIs.
Our search engine performs the searches on behalf of our users. This means that rather than using Google or Brave Search directly, our Leta server makes the requests.
Searching by proxy in other words.
Never gave this much thought. I've been considering subscribing for Kagi again, but basically they are paying for a Google API subscription, meaning that Google directly monetizes my Kagi searches?
To be completely honest, I'm less worried about privacy and more worried about what kind of world I'm contributing to with my internet usage. I Mullvad sends money to Google for every search, it's probably not for me.
Switched to Qwant now - rather Microsoft than Google, and at least they are working on their own engine.
Can you please link to the paid Google API you're talking about? I wasn't aware they had an API for web search.
Leta acts as a proxy to Google and Brave search
Great! As much as I love DDG, Google is unfortunately still superior and I had no choice but to suck it up and use the latter from time to time. If I could use Google by way of proxy to preserve privacy, then this is great news!
I think Kagi si better than Google, but under the hood it just mixes results from Google, Bing and Yandex.
Kagi have their own index too.
Aren't there a lot of engines that already do this
If only there were a search index I thought was still good.
This is also what Startpage does.
And Searx
I don't like how it tells you when the results were cached. You can tell if and when a query was searched for by someone else.
I do like it because when I'm trying to find out more information about break8ng events I want to know if I'm getting outdated information. Also, knowing that someone, somewhere in the world entered the same search terms as you within the last 30 days tells you absolutely nothing about that person.
Unless the terms include a name or location. Plus Leta is not widely used.
Suppose you tell someone in secret that you were arrested. You know they use Leta, so you look up "John Doe arrest" later and see that it was just recently cached. You only told one person so it must have been them. You now know what someone searched because they used Leta.
While this is nice, I would really like to see more fully independent options that are not just a proxy for Google/Bing. I realize that is a lot easier said than done, but this kind of solution is not providing a real alternative in anything but name only. Google/Microsoft fully control the APIs being used. so this only exists so long as those they are trying to provide an alternative for allow them to exist. Which will not scale if they are anything but a blip on the radar.
Its cool seeing the Mullvad team keep pushing forward with privacy related services. If I ever need to search Google with JS turned off, I'll use...SearXNG, but this is cool too.
I actually thought this is what Startpage was already doing essentially
what URL do I set for suggestions?
<<< hearch.co
No images and news categories?
try this for images - https://hearch.co/
paste url has an extra 25 in it. thx for the info tho!