Mullvad's privacy-focused search engine Leta is now free for all users | Leta acts as a proxy for Google and Brave search results

[z3ror0ne@lemmy.ml]

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.

[imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works]

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.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

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.

[pfr@lemmy.sdf.org]

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.

[lodemike@lemmy.today]

It's like saying a passenger rail car is a freight engine

[subtext@lemmy.world]

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.

[krelis_@lemmy.world]

I think they just call them trains

[krelis_@lemmy.world]

Now I'm getting confused. Are DDG and Qwant not proxies for Bing?

[farraigeplaisteach@lemmy.world]

But doesn't Leta use Bing as it's backend also?

[Guest]

No, it uses Google and Brave search.

[tankovayadiviziya@lemmy.world]

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!

[yarharsuperstar@lemmy.world]

It is still a good reason not to use Ecosia, however.

[01189998819991197253@infosec.pub]

Wait... what's wrong with startpage?

[elgenzay@lemmy.ml]

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.

[theloweststone@lemmy.world]

I do like it because when I'm trying to find out more information about break8ng events I want to know if I'm getting outdated information.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.

[padge@lemmy.zip]

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

[elgenzay@lemmy.ml]

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.

[null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Surely it has to be the paid APIs. You can't build a service hoping Google won't notice your bots running searches.

[null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Searx can provide a much better experience.

For example, on the instance I'm using if a search result is a Google thread, the link will direct you to a redlib reddit proxy.

[padge@lemmy.zip]

I guess you would need a lot of proxies. And they probably need to be on Googles good side to keep their VPN extension in Chrome