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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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
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.
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Now I'm getting confused. Are DDG and Qwant not proxies for Bing?
Not exactly, they are search engines in their own right that have their own crawlers, but also use the Bing API. Leta is literally a proxy, it searches on the google (or brave) search website on your behalf and serves you the results. That way the only data Google gets is Mullvad's.
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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Just a heads up, some of the details in the FAQ and Terms of Service seem a bit outdated and might not be accurate anymore.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=%s
You can select which backend engine to use as follows:
- Google: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%s&engine=google
- Brave: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%s&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 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.
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Good news, they are doing just that (in cooperation with Ecosia)
That is some unexpectedly good news. I'm looking forward to see the results of an EU based search index.
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That would be incredibly slow
Maybe that's why they cache results for 30 days?
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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
Can you please link to the paid Google API you're talking about? I wasn't aware they had an API for web search.
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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.
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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=%s
You can select which backend engine to use as follows:
- Google: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%s&engine=google
- Brave: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%s&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.
So SearXNG?
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A privacy-focused search should not potentially reveal to others that you searched something. My examples prove the possibility that it can do that. I'm sure there's other examples that are less "weird".
So name one...
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It's like saying a passenger rail car is a freight engine
I think it's more like a travel agent and a passenger rail
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So SearXNG?
SearXNG
Always wondered how the fuck I'm supposed to say that.
Seeks'nn'jnn?
Sur X N G?
Search engine? -
So name one...
No. You can raise concerns about a potential vulnerability without having identified a specific real-world method of exploitation.
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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).
Mojeek (UK-based) is trying. I wasn't super impressed by their index yet, though.
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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=%s
You can select which backend engine to use as follows:
- Google: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%s&engine=google
- Brave: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%s&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.
If only there were a search index I thought was still good.
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SearXNG
Always wondered how the fuck I'm supposed to say that.
Seeks'nn'jnn?
Sur X N G?
Search engine?I just say that as SearchesNG
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SearXNG
Always wondered how the fuck I'm supposed to say that.
Seeks'nn'jnn?
Sur X N G?
Search engine?Search'ng?
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Good moves from Ecosia. They used to get some flack for using Bing and Google.
The entire reason I stopped using them was because they agreed to share more user data with Google and Microsoft in return for being allowed to keep using their search results. If they had an independent index without those kinds of tracking for big tech companies, I'd switch back in a heartbeat.
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SearXNG
Always wondered how the fuck I'm supposed to say that.
Seeks'nn'jnn?
Sur X N G?
Search engine?I pronounce it like it's spelled, searksng.
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SearXNG
Always wondered how the fuck I'm supposed to say that.
Seeks'nn'jnn?
Sur X N G?
Search engine?Probably the last one, I guess it's kinda like nginx
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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=%s
You can select which backend engine to use as follows:
- Google: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%s&engine=google
- Brave: https://leta.mullvad.net/?q=%s&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.
This is also what Startpage does.
