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

[theherk@lemmy.world]

DDG has been superb for me for a few years now often returning results I prefer over Google. I’m really pleased with it.

[theherk@lemmy.world]

I get what you’re saying, but in that case the google.com interface isn’t a search engine; nor the load balancers and proxies between it and the search application backend. And then, maybe those don’t count because there is some special sauce in database procedures that are the real workhorses.

Pedantry all the way down.

[kepix@lemmy.world]

paste url has an extra 25 in it. thx for the info tho!

[evotech@lemmy.world]

Aren't there a lot of engines that already do this

[tankovayadiviziya@lemmy.world]

It probably depends what you're looking for, but I find DDG to have fewer up-to-date results than Google.

[leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

'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.

[tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Good news, they are doing just that (in cooperation with Ecosia)

[u_u@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Good moves from Ecosia. They used to get some flack for using Bing and Google.

[scrollone@feddit.it]

I think Kagi si better than Google, but under the hood it just mixes results from Google, Bing and Yandex.

[Guest]

No images and news categories?

[cabbage@piefed.social]

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.

[Guest]

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.

[zink@programming.dev]

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.

[vonreposti@feddit.dk]

That is some unexpectedly good news. I'm looking forward to see the results of an EU based search index.

[dan@upvote.au]

Maybe that's why they cache results for 30 days?

[dan@upvote.au]

Can you please link to the paid Google API you're talking about? I wasn't aware they had an API for web search.

[dan@upvote.au]

Kagi have their own index too.

[fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com]

So SearXNG?

[theloweststone@lemmy.world]

So name one...

[dutchkimble@lemy.lol]

I think it's more like a travel agent and a passenger rail