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Just a heads up, some of the details in the FAQ and Terms of Service seem a bit outdated and might not be accurate anymore.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.
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That's nice, but I feel we need engines with independent indexes and crawlers more than another metasearch engine that just acts as a private middleman to big tech corps.
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Who will do that, for free, for no benefit?
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The decision to cache results is interesting. (When I searched "Mullvad Leta," this critique of it popped up.) As far as I can tell, though, this is a really promising looking search engine.
Unlike DuckDuckGo and so many other engines, you don't have to rely on Bing's results (they usually work for me, but I've heard complaints. And getting pointed at the same news aggregators can be annoying.)
Unlike Brave, the results arrive quickly. Presumably, it also won't hit me with captchas like Brave has in the past.
Unlike Kagi, I don't have to worry about signing in with an email address and unknowingly funding Brave, Yandex, or whoever they contracted with. (Vladimir Prelovac hid the source data out of what appears to be spite.)
Unlike Google... Do I even need to elaborate? It's Mullvad. They have a reputation for being the best, not the worst.
Here's to hoping competitors follow suit.
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Unlike DuckDuckGo and so many other engines, you don't have to rely on Bing's results (they usually work for me, but I've heard complaints)
I've found this is no longer true. For the last 6-12 months when I drop a !g to check Google, the results are equally insufficient. The only time Google provides better results anymore is with
site:reddit.com, which is expected due to the exclusivity deal. -
30 days caching is a bad idea in a fast changing internet on hot topics.
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Think the only criticism they might face is a having an all your eggs in one basket situation (VPN, browser and now even a search engine). But honestly this is a welcome addition to search engines imo.
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I've been using SearXNG and its predecessor for years and I have no reason to change that. Highly recommend you check it out.
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It's not private though unless you host it on a VPS.
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Duckduckgo is similar, but returning Bing results, right? And google results suck these days.
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DDG came out as a non bubble results search engine. It is absolutely a bubble result now. If I search a short nonsensical few letters, I will get random results of doctors, agencies and companies in my small Irish town. If you turn off location it just either does nothing or sprinkles in a couple other results into the hyper focused ones. They became part of the problem they were trying to solve.
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Absolutely this. I'm excited to try Mullvad, but with Kagi being the only one listed I'm never going to try, I can firmly say from my perspective search engines all suck big time these days. 15 years ago I think my search success on Google was somewhere around 80%, now I would say it's somewhere around 20%, takes me dozens of searches and variations on wording to find what I'm looking for. DDG never gives me good results, because it feels like Bing has only crawled 10% of the Internet. SearX or whatever it's called and it's variations all were way more headache than they were worth and I had tons of issues with them.
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Startpage is solid
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How is this different from Startpage?
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Startpage was bought by a shady company a while back. Mullvad has been a trustworthy company so far. I've been a long-time startpage user and I'm glad there's a better alternative.
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I'm in exactly the same situation. I've noticed worse and worse ads on Startpage, and they seem to find new ways around uBO so it's a constant battle. Not to mention the news tab on Startpage forcing me to view almost everything via MSN, making it useless.
Sear XNG instances work great, when they're up, but turns out there are no very reliable public instances (which, to be clear, is totally understandable ... but often I find myself searching things in a pinch, and I don't want "how to stop the bleeding" with no results on searx.tiekoetter.com to be the last thing my loved ones find on my phonescreen).
I'm totally giving this one a shot for a while.
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Word. That’s good to know. I’ll give it a shot.
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Not particularly shady
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I'm trying to add it on Android
~~this doesn't work
https://leta.mullvad.net/search?q=%25s~~edit: this works
https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%25s-
I deleted the 25 at the end of the string and it seems to be working fine for me. (Firefox on Android)
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thanks. I was trying to make it the default in Fennec. see my edit
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It's amazing how fast it is, even for uncached queries. For cached ones, it retrieves results before I can even mentally register that I pressed Enter.
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I didn't understand why they say it's useless to use if you have fingerprinting protection and don't save cookies? Can someone please explain?
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what they basically say is that (and this is only valid for people using tor or mullvad browser with stock settings) if everyone has the same fingerprint, and if you dont sign in to anything else, they basically look same to the websites, so you dont have to use some privacy frontend, it is ot adding in any benefit. However, these conditions deffenitely are not that easy to meet for day to day use.
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I think they are saying that if you do everthingg in that list, meaning perfectly secure everything yourself, that it’s a useless service because that’s the list of things it does. It seems to be written by a sarcastic asshole.
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i prefer sticking with hearchco
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They need some theme options, that blue on blue isn't the most pleasant.
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Thank you. This may well be the search engine I have been waiting for.
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Caching search results sounds like a bad idea. The relevance of hot topics on the internet changes really fast.
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Hot topics likely would have new and unique search terms, but maybe looking up the very latest news is just not this system's strength. Thankfully there's more out there than the last 30 days' news.
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