Mullvad's privacy-focused search engine Leta is now free for all users | Leta acts as a proxy for Google and Brave search results
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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.
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search engine
Not a search engine.
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Your search query, IP address and iirc fingerprint gets shown to Bing everytime you make a search, so it's not private at all
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Ehhh. I mean, technically yes, but a proxy for search engine requests is probably functionally equivalent to the end user.
Also, if users don't know that such a thing exists and goes looking for a "search engine", they likely also want this.
One of my personal pet peeves is power stations --- a big lithium-ion battery pack hooked up to a charge controller and inverter and USB power supply and with points to attach solar panels --- being called a "solar generator". It's not a generator, doesn't use mechanical energy. But...a lot of people who think "I need electricity in an outage" just go searching for "generator". I don't like the practice, but I think that the aim is less to deceive users and more to try to deal with the fact that they functionally act in much the same role and people might not otherwise think of them.
I am less sympathetic to vendors who do the same with calling evaporative coolers "air conditioners". Those have some level of overlap in use, but are substantially different devices in price and capability.
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Someone explain to be why this is better than using DDG or Qwant or SearX?
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I don't see them claiming it is
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It's not, but it is better than using google
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Mullvad is Swedish
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Honest question: how can it be better to search Google through a proxy than using Google? You're still feeding the beast?
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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.
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The beast eats personal data and sells it as ad revenue. If you are searching via proxy they can still collect general interest stats but not link it to an individual. It is not as profitable for them.
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The Beast is fed by collecting data about you and then serving you back ads accordingly. This strips the data and the ads, so you feed them nothing.
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I genuinely feel that Google's search results have gotten really bad, over the last years especially. I find DDG results to be much better generally. If Mullvad Leta also proxied DDG for another layer of privacy then I'd use it, but not even it's only search engines are Google and Brave.
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It's like saying a passenger rail car is a freight engine
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Is it really though? To the common person, it is most important thinking about the intent rather than what the word literally means. Like what people think of as AI may really just be a LLM, or VR may really be AR, or the like.
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I think they just call them trains
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Now I'm getting confused. Are DDG and Qwant not proxies for Bing?
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But doesn't Leta use Bing as it's backend also?
