Mullvad Leta: A search engine used in the Mullvad Browser

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/6/20/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-search-engine-used-in-the-mullvad-browser/

by pnt12 • 3 years ago

284 142 3 years ago

mullvad.net

threeseed2• 3 years ago

Not sure by what definition this is a search engine.

It's a caching proxy for Google Search and could well just be Squid.

I assume it also doesn't interact well with Google's location services.

piaste8• 3 years ago

Strange question. Why on Earth would a privacy service want to "interact well" with Google location tracking in the first place?

It's a bit like asking if you can install Cortana on Trisquel GNU/Linux.

threeseed2• 3 years ago

Because if I am searching for a review of cafe or want to know where a movie is showing I would prefer it to be in the same continent as me.

I am not expecting it to know my exact GPS location but would be nice if it could at least bring state or country level tailored search results.

marginalia_nu• 3 years ago

User profiling is a huge reason why Google works as well as it does. Location data is just one part of that, but a pretty big one.

If you remove that, it's as bad (or worse) than most of its competition.

Kiro• 3 years ago

So DDG is not a search engine either?

i_read_news• 3 years ago

I consider these either proxy-search engines or meta-search engines. Either way, it still accomplishes the goal of a search engine for the end user, even if it’s not the one doing the heavy lifting.

Etheryte• 3 years ago

As a paying customer, I think this is a really good way to use the resources. While it does rely on Google not pulling the plug on using the API that way, I think for the time being it's a great way to reduce your online footprint. Very few of my searches need freshest data by the hour and I can always either make the search string more specific to cache bust or go back to Google for search.

pgl2• 3 years ago

Mullvad really does have a commitment to privacy.

Some key points:

- Acts as a Google proxy, removes tracking links and caches results

- Only available for Mullvad paid users

- 100 free direct searches a day, unlimited cached searches (further search result pages count towards limit)

- Results cached over all users for 30 days

keyle• 3 years ago

I'm sorry but besides your first point, what is substantial in the claim that they have a commitment to privacy?

Also why would I trust them over Google?

panick21_• 3 years ago

- The offer many types of payment, some that can be anonymous.

- They have strong commitment to open source and have put their finances into that in addition to releasing code.

- They are doing a lot in terms of transparent infrastructure: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/1/12/diskless-infrastructur...

Also why would I trust them over Google?

For Google your data is the product, for Mullvad you pay for a service.

zirgs• 3 years ago

You can't trust anyone, but for Mullvad you're a customer not a product.

pgl2• 3 years ago

It all comes down to trust in the end, but over time I've come to trust Mullvad more and more. One particular example that sticks out to me is that they ended subscription based billing, specifically because it required them to hold customer information that they didn't want to have.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-opti...

You can see an example of their lack of data retention from a post about when they were raided - there was nothing to find.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/4/20/mullvad-vpn-was-subjec...

Their blog is a good place if you want to get a sense of what they're like as a company.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/

secfirstmd• 3 years ago

Lol. Sure. M247 Ltd limited hosts...

htrbcav• 3 years ago

I was wondering already why Sweden, home of the Pirate Bay and Assange lawsuits, does not shut it down. This could be the answer.

ignoramous• 3 years ago

I don't see anything in their terms of service / privacy policy re Leta. It'd be nice to know if they retain any sort of data at all (there's prominent mention to caching stuff, but just what are they caching?), regardless of whether it is tied to PII.

Melatonic4• 3 years ago

Problem is that Google search itself has still gone downhill......

This is a cool addition for sure though

danpalmer• 3 years ago

I remember ~10 years ago that Google said 40% of searches were unique. Just searching for that again now I can see this[1] tweet that suggests it's 15% as of 2022, that's with billions of users.

I wonder how well the caching actually works for a user base of the size that Mullvad has.

This could be tackled with a different UX, perhaps rather than showing predictive search, instead showing similar queries that are in the cache? I'm not a customer so can't see the product, can any customers give any input as to what the UX is and whether it might be improving their cache hit rate?

[1] https://twitter.com/Google/status/1493681643290300425

zjnevnf• 3 years ago

There's a checkbox to only search in cached results, although in my experience so far it had no results except for very generic searches like "google". Even "python" didn't show anything.

pnt122• 3 years ago

Good question: I see one way it may work and another it may not.

I think the profile of their users is less diversified: mostly tech savvy people. "Normies" are using those vpns advertised in YouTube, or not using any at all. This may result in similar interests and lower the number of unique queries.

On the other hand, we may produce more unique queries than other people: who will receive-use the cached "how to fix ValueError on main.py:67"?

bentcorner• 3 years ago

As far as I can tell there's no predictive search. UI is a simple search box, optional country selector dropdown and an "Only search in cache" checkbox. Smoke test shows the cache checkbox works - apparently nobody else has searched for "dog" in the US.

The country dropdown is interesting as far as the cache goes - not selecting a country is meaningful as far as the cache is concerned. My prior "dog" query in the US does not return hits if I don't select a country. Not selecting a country and searching the cache appears to return english results (with a few sample searches).

It's interesting that you can explore the cache with this checkbox. Not sure if there are any privacy concerns with this feature - considering cache searches are "free" you can kind of scrape what other users are searching for, maybe with enough users it doesn't really matter. I suppose there could be rate limiting and such to prevent this kind of attack, but that's just a guess.

It may be useful to have an option to opt-out your search from cache.

RadiozRadioz• 3 years ago

Mullvad does have the happenstantial advantage that its userbase likely nowhere near as diverse as Google's, naturally following that the queries themselves are not as diverse. While Google fields requests across the full diversity of the globe, Mullvad's userbase likely skews toward middle-high income westerners with a STEM background searching in English. The types of queries these users are making are probably from a much narrower corpus of topics; I wonder what percentage of the queries revolve around privacy, Linux, software, typical hacker hobbies like woodworking, et cetera. This isn't to say that these are the only types of queries being made, but if you were to group Mullvad users into equivalently broad advertising cohorts, you'd probably end up with far fewer than Google's users.

The interests being more heterogeneous results in more similar queries, which would increase the proportion of cache hits. Whether this is enough to help make the strategy viable is another matter, but I do think it's worth noting.

I also wonder about the complexity of the queries themselves. The more technical users would probably use more complex combinations of operators, but they're also more likely to search by keyword rather than natural language.

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

But people who actively use VPNs are not necessary those with a search history that follows a short tail distribution. Mullvad gets a good chunk of its revenue from Firefox and other white labels too.

flas9sd• 3 years ago

a statistic I'd be interested in: what percentage of searches can be answered computationally cheap. As in: Wikipedia title index, simple word lookup dictionaries. Indices that could complement a caching search-engine proxy to not hit its origin crawl repository.

A study[1] by wikipedia done with DDG notes it showed up in the top5 results and information module for ~13% of searches with a click-through rate for each at ~8% - so a total of ~16% click-through rate. Granted, that is not a number gained from title searches but the whole articles.

[1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedi...

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

I'm still very disappointed with the discontinuation of port forwarding and wish they would be more transparent about their reasoning.

honeybadger1• 3 years ago

Seems like a way to curb costs..It is quite common that plex server enthusiasts will run their entire piracy automation over good always-on VPN services and that requires port forwarding to do so. AirVPN still does it and I have had an account with them for far longer than any other VPN service.

rashkov• 3 years ago

Now that you mention it, I’m amazed that charging $5 a month is enough to cover unlimited bandwidth across a user pool with these kinds of high bandwidth usage patterns

mritzmann• 3 years ago

It was communicated transparently: it was abused too often.

It's not a secret that a no-log policy also attracts abuse.

https://mullvad.net/de/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-f...

theossuary• 3 years ago

Cool, I have 8 months prepaid for a service I can no longer use because they have a months notice they're removing a feature I need. And they refuse to refund crypto, the payment method they supposedly prefer.

What I get for trusting mullvad I guess.

pnt122• 3 years ago

They explained it:

Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/29/removing-the-support-f...

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

I've seen that but I still have questions. Which hosts? Who are the IP blacklisters (at least the big names)? What kind of undesirable content was the last straw? Copyrighted material, CSAM, terrorists, or worse?

madars• 3 years ago

It's pretty much a content-free statement.

Prompt: Give me a single sentence technical reasoning a VPN company could use to discontinue port forwarding feature.

GPT4: "Due to the increased security risks and potential for exploitation associated with port forwarding, we have decided to discontinue this feature to enhance the privacy and security of our VPN services."

risho• 3 years ago

yeah if only they made a blog post explaining exactly why they disabled port forwarding.

infinitedata• 3 years ago

When you access it while using Mullvad, it still asks you for your account number. Service should automatically detect you are on VPN and let you search, why the need for the extra step?

coffeeri2• 3 years ago

It is good that this does not work. As one IP might be shared by multiple accounts. A cache of the mapping IP --> AccountNo is also not favorable in terms of privacy.

piaste8• 3 years ago

As one IP might be shared by multiple accounts.

No "might" about it, that's one of the most important traits of this type of service.

piaste8• 3 years ago

To enforce the usage limits.

varispeed• 3 years ago

Can you guess someone else's account id or sort of brute force to find valid ids and then run malicious searches against them?

Seems like a security risk.

ipsum2• 3 years ago

What happens if someone searches their home address or a place nearby? If it's automatically cached, it could be a data leak. Some sufficiently motivated person can correlate it with someone who connects to Mullvad servers.

swores• 3 years ago

Well that would only show (if indeed it can leak somehow) that somebody used Mullvad to search for that - if using it for yourself it wouldn't be hard to say "cafe near 49 my street" rather than "44 my street", or whatever, so a) that's probably the kind of caution you should always use if wanting to protect privacy or your house number since there's essentially no downside, unless you're literally ordering something to be physically delivered and b) it gives plausible deniability that anyone whose house address were known to have been searched doesn't really mean the person living there is the one who searched it.

(But of course, ideally they would have something in place to prevent such a leak at all, and perhaps they do somehow?)

philprx• 3 years ago

As I understand it, it's the result to a given search string that is cached.

Sure, If I search for "44 little poney street", then the result itself is cached at Mullvad, and someone needs to search himself/herself for "44 little poney street" by entering precisely this search string to access the cached page.

So I don't see a leak with caching... There are leaks anyway: the search term sent to Google, if someone compromises Mullvad, etc... But not one specific with caching and related to other users.

Musky• 3 years ago

This has also been noted by Assured AB when they did their security audit of the service [0].

3.4.1 Note Plaintext search queries in cache database
Assured recommended hashing search terms before insertion / lookup in the cache database. Since search term cache lookups are only performed with exact matching, this should not affect functionality.
Mullvad: We are now hashing (and salting) the search terms before they are added to Redis

[0] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/5/16/security-audit-of-our-...

AHOHA4• 3 years ago

Mullvad VPN, Mullvad browser, Mullvad search engine.. never ever put all your eggs in one basket, so much data and meta data can be collected and cross referenced to your ID.

piaste8• 3 years ago

It's a bit more nuanced. Let's keep it simple and say you produce 3 data sets when browsing and clicking on results: search queries, DNS queries, HTTPS queries.

If it takes a correlation of the 3 datasets to identify you, then it is better to use 3 different providers.

However, if any one of those datasets is sufficient to ID you, then it is better to choose a single provider.

AHOHA4• 3 years ago

Unfortunately it isn’t that simple, from the moment your device connect to the wifi for example, every sigle information/packet/etc. shared or stored can be used to identify you, the more you share, the more can be collected to identify you. Now VPN alone by concept isn’t meant for privacy as you always have to trust the unregulated provider (contrary to your ISP for example), when all your data is tunneled through their servers, that’s a lone is big risk based on a trust only, however, and due to the nature of these shared IP vpns, sometimes maybe (keyword maybe) it’s challenging to pinpoint a specific client, and here comes the others, a browser that can have unique fingerprint, and now search queries that can add an extra source of information to further pinpoint you, especially as others mentioned below that you still need to enter your VPN code to use that search engine.. I haven’t tried it yet to give my personal experience as I stopped using mullvad, but if I did I will update this post further.

hammock• 3 years ago

Google DNS, Google Chrome, Google search...

AHOHA4• 3 years ago

Exactly, it’s never a good idea to do that, the only difference is google doesn’t advertise itself as a privacy advocate so when someone use all these google services they don’t really care about the collected data, on the other hand, the userbase of mullvad will have that false sense of security and privacy while putting more and more trust in Mullvad, it’s just a matter of time until some bad news drops.

Thorentis• 3 years ago

Mullvad was the darling of the Vpn world, up until they removed support for Port forwarding. Would be really curious to see if their subscriber numbers have tanked since then.

Hakkin4• 3 years ago

As a 10+ year paying Mullvad customer, it hasn't changed my experience using the product at all, and I recently deposited another years worth of credit. While I did occasionally use port forwarding, it certainly wasn't a "must have feature" for me. I mostly found it useful for temporarily exposing services publicly, but there are plenty of alternatives that accomplish the same thing these days. The only Mullvad unique-ish feature (I believe some other VPNs offer something similar) I use regularly is their SOCKS5 endpoints, it's very convenient to be able to connect to any of their exit nodes from any server. Otherwise I mostly just want a bog standard Wireguard VPN.

It seems the people this most affected were the ones using VPNs primarily for torrenting, which I've always just used a VPS or dedicated server for. Though, even in that case, it's not like it's impossible to torrent without port forwarding, millions of people do it every day behind their NAT.

It is unfortunate they had to remove the feature, but I have to assume the abuse of the feature was at the level where it was threatening the service as a whole, if I had to choose between Mullvad without port forwarding or no Mullvad at all, I'd obviously choose the former. They also do seem to be refunding people who request it, so it doesn't really seem like any kind of "rug pull" or anything.

Gasp0de3• 3 years ago

Why would I need port forwarding to torrent? I've been using it for ages without.

AHOHA4• 3 years ago

it hasn't changed my experience using the product at all

It did change though, I’ve been using them since they started but in the past 2ish years their network is very bad, slow, continuous interruptions and disconnects (can’t say it correlates but noticed happened around the time Mozilla VPN started as they use the mullvad backbone), blocked in a lot of regions even in some government websites, anong other issues, the straw was when they stopped port forwarding.

mongol2• 3 years ago

Where do you get the VPS?

Gasp0de3• 3 years ago

The port forwarding feature was abused heavily. I understand and support their decision to remove it, as it improves the reputation of their IP addresses

bearmode• 3 years ago

Mullvad was the darling of the Vpn world

Very much still are.

TobyTheDog123• 3 years ago

I very much doubt many good actors left the service over it. I assume their popularity comes from a battle-tested no-logs claim, a good UI/UX, and a general consensus that they're trustworthy.

mig39• 3 years ago

I'm wondering if the port forwarding was the reason so many of Mullvad's IPs were frequently blocked or had "bad reputations" ?

Anyway, I've been a customer for a long time, and will continue to be.

rmi_• 3 years ago

Wonder how it compares to other privacy-minding Google-proxies, such as startpage.com

piaste8• 3 years ago

At a quick glance:

- Leta is much faster than Startpagw - Startpage offers a lot more of Google's features, eg date range filter, image search, and so on

I would guess that both differences are due to Startpage not doing any caching.

Startpage also has a neat "Anonymous View" feature where they proxy the request for you, acting as your HTTP client. If you trust Startpage, it's probably a pretty good ad-hoc anonymity tool.

moss2• 3 years ago

I looked over there list of "achievements" in their About page.

They state that in 2022 they stopped accepting subscription payments because it forces them to store data about their users for long periods of time. Now they only accept one-time payments for monthly memberships.

They really are committed to privacy.

z3c0• 3 years ago

They've truly demonstrated something I believed untrue prior, and that's the notion that a company can keep growing while maintaining very strong opinions and principals. I switched to Mullvad after PIA's acquisition, thinking it would be a temporary stop until they inevitability alienated their original userbase. But nope, they've only gotten better.

chefandy• 3 years ago

I'm not a business guy so I might be full of shit, but I think they're playing the long game and know who their audience is. They're trying to distinguish themselves from a bazillion fly-by-night VPN providers: not doing the current standard 'vacuum up every conceivable bit, nibble, and byte in case it's useful for marketing or resale later' is a great way to a) get a great word-of-mouth rep from credible people, and b) get a customer base more compelled by marketing real improvements to your core ecosystem than totally BS super flashy marketing and ad budgets. Flashy marketing might be super effective in the short term, but if genuine improvements to your core offering are your biggest selling point, that seems like it would directly contribute to long-term sustainability.

Given, this is assuming everything they say is legit. It's kind of hard to not be jaded these days.

DemiGuru• 3 years ago

This service is not ubiquitous which is something I expect of a search engine. From my perspective the limitations lie with the fact you need to be logged-in to their VPN service in order to use it. Yes, it's a way to ensure that only paid customers can use it. But those paid customers will only be able to use it on their personal devices. Nowhere else. Most if not all work environments block third party VPNs.

red-iron-pine3• 3 years ago

And that's fine. You're on a work network and using work hardware -- you don't get to use whatever you want, even if we have a Guest Network.

yuumei• 3 years ago

Have been using Mullvad for a few years now. Has been working well, this search actually looks useful. But one suggestion: can I pay for a dedicated, non advertised, residential IP please Mullvad? Lots of places are blocking VPNs now, like cloudflare.

Hakkin4• 3 years ago

I would think it would be extremely difficult to provide residential IPs in a privacy-preserving way, from what I've heard most services that offer them are quite sketchy in how they go about "acquiring" those IPs. The very nature of "residential" IPs means your traffic is flowing through some random person's home internet, which certainly isn't something I would want, even these days where almost everything is encrypted. There would be no way Mullvad could provide any kind of privacy guarantee if they don't control the endpoints.

miohtama• 3 years ago

Providing residential IP as a service would be breaking some agreements, or lying somewhere. I don’t Mullvad can do this, because they are committed to openess and transparency. For resident IP thru malware services you need to look up other dishonest competitors.

_rs• 3 years ago

I suppose this isn’t a highly requested feature because as soon as you have a dedicated IP you become easily trackable. I wonder if there’s any middle ground to prevent that

red-iron-pine3• 3 years ago

using residential IPs for commercial purposes is expressly forbidden by most ISPs.

rhim• 3 years ago

What is the difference to a self-hosted version of: https://github.com/searxng/searxng ?

pvitz• 3 years ago

I guess that you couldn't be fingerprinted by Google.

humid9059• 3 years ago

I am going to use public Searxes for comparison.

The difference is that there is less noise from other users as it is limited to Mullvad subscribers, and there is presumably a smaller user base.

Otherwise, there is probably little to no difference, considering that Searxes are not used by many in the same vein.

However, self-hosting is the equivalent of directly using the search engine under your own IP, just without javascript. There is no noise from other users looking up unrelated queries.

aorth3• 3 years ago

I'm a Mullvad customer and will check this out. I can already see that this is not so convenient for when you're on a device or network where your Mullvad connection is not active. For example, I'm typing this from my work laptop on the corporate network as we speak. :P

On a related note, I am also a happy Kagi customer. It's a paid, privacy-focused search engine that gives you a "magic" session link to allow easily searching from multiple devices. Very happy with the search there. Haven't used Google more than a handful of times for several months!

dharmab2• 3 years ago

The magic session link was such a great idea. I could easily add a session to my work computer.

d4mi3n• 3 years ago

Both a customer (and now investor!) if Kagi’s and can’t say enough nice things about the product. It’s refreshing to have a search engine that will give you relevant results rather than shoveling ads down your throat.

unshavedyak4• 3 years ago

Same, love Kagi. I think the biggest surprise for me was that it is getting frequent improvements.

I'm so used to Subscriptions being just a drain. You "buy" the product, and then you pay just to keep using it. Which can feel, emotionally, a bit unappetizing because i'd rather just purchase it fully. The subscription just feels like a money sink with no added value.

Conversely i've not had that opinion with Kagi. Not only am i happy with the product, but the frequent[1] improvements[2] make me feel like i'm buying something newer and better each month.

Developments on FastGPT, increasing what i get for my dollar, integration of more features in general. I frankly assume i just joined at a good time, because this pace can't keep up.. right lol? Regardless my Kagi subscription has felt like i'm getting more value each month. From other companies i'd feel lucky to get these advancements, and if i did i'd expect it to cost me more. "5 new features? Welp, i guess i get to buy a Pro subscription tier to access it" or w/e, is what i'd expect.

Really can't praise Kagi enough.

[1]: within the last couple months, at least, as i'm new to the product and have only been subscribed for 2 months.

[2]: You can see some here: https://blog.kagi.com/blog

Melatonic4• 3 years ago

Image search was already good and hugely improved - and the native reverse image search is also pretty cool!

rurp• 3 years ago

I really hope they improve their pricing/usage plan. I wasn't that impressed with the results when I first tried Kagi out, but was planning on giving it some more chances down the line. Sometimes it takes a few tries before a new tool really sticks for me.

Unfortunately they ended that sort of trial usage with the new payment plans. I'm already wary of starting any new saas payments, and one where I need to worry about how many searches I'm doing per month is a non-starter.

M95D3• 3 years ago

I never heard of Kagi before. I'm always looking for ways to increase my privacy, so I study the site a little bit and I find this:

"Next, your request will find its way to our servers hosted on Google Cloud platform, where our main application is running [...]"

I stopped there. I'm not going to subscribe. But I appreciate that at least they were honest.

Melatonic4• 3 years ago

Kagi is awesome - also a paying customer on their now grandfathered in tier - and it only gets better with time! The image search function is hugely improved and the main core search is blowing away Google for most uses.

Also love that they added reverse image search now

Not currently a Mullvad customer ( I was in the past ) but this looks definitely like a good thing!

stavros7• 3 years ago

Are the results really that much better? I use DDG and paying $10/mo for a search engine seems like a tall order, especially when I don't know if Kagi can be that much less broken than Google.

Melatonic4• 3 years ago

I did not do an extensive comparison to DDG but I would say it is definitely worth it. Been paying for awhile now and it blows away Google. And they are constantly adding new features and improving old ones (and finding new ways to improve their back end costs as well which makes it more sustainable).

I use search engines a TON though (especially for work) so 10$ a month is absolutely worth it for me. I am currently trying to convince my boss to buy it for our whole IT team

dharmab2• 3 years ago

For technical info like programming language references, I get much better results in Kagi after I spent a few minutes setting my blocks and pins. I just searched "run a test suite in go" in Google, DDG and Kagi, and blogspam results were higher in Google and DDG while GoDoc and Stack Overflow was higher for me in Kagi. Many of the DDG results were about running a single test out of a suite, rather than running a suite.

artdigital• 3 years ago

IMHO yes. With DDG I always felt I needed to make it work. With Kagi I forget I even use something not-Google

aio22• 3 years ago

May I ask why specifically Kagi? What's special about it compared to other search engines, aside from being privacy friendly? Like, you could say Searx is also nice because of that. Or Duckduckgo. Or Brave Search.

What sets Kagi apart, and especially, what makes it different?

aorth3• 3 years ago

After years of trying Duckduckgo and then always going back to Google, it was this 2022 interview with the Kagi founder https://dkb.blog/p/kagi-interview that I read a few months ago that got me to try Kagi. I was shocked that they thought people would pay $10/month for a search engine. Then I thought, "if Google lets us search for free, how much must it be worth for them?" Over the last few years I've started trying to pay for things that I use, and financially supporting developers working on products I like. That's when I decided to try Kagi.

And yes, I have used Google only a dozen or so times in the last few months since I went all-in on Kagi on all my devices. The search results are very good.

IgorPartola• 3 years ago

Not the person you are replying to but DDG is just as bad as Google at returning and prioritizing blogspam results. “Recipe for oatmilk” returns a slew of 2500 word articles that start with “What is Oatmilk” and “How is Oatmilk Different from Milk”. I just want to know the ratios. A search engine they can do that for me would be great.

Another example “XYZ-brand motorcycle boots after crash”. I want to know how well they survive an actual crash and the brand is popular enough that I bet there are plenty of images out there. Yet all I get is a bunch of promo images of brand new boots.

Give me a search engine that’ll actually return results I want!

_benj• 3 years ago

Not op but also a very happy kagi customer. This is usually hard to answer because search results is very dependent on what is searched. For me the quality of results instead of a bunch “top 10 libraries to use with react in 2023” kind of results is what sets it apart for me. I can prioritize what kind of results or sites I want stuff from, I’ve been surprised multiple times by finding a random blog post from somebody working with some tool/library that I’ve search for.

I’d suggest to give it a try, it took less than then 50 search a month limit for me to jump onboard

replwoacause• 3 years ago

Kagi is excellent and I’m happy to be a paying customer.

celtoid• 3 years ago

As a longtime Mullvad customer, I'll use this. Using any VPN company and its services in this age of surveillance capitalism is always a sketchy affair. Mullvad is the least sketchy of the non-DIY options that I can find.

hammeiam• 3 years ago

Does Google TOS allow for caching of results? A lot of APIs (esp map/geo apis) do not

okso• 3 years ago

I am curious about the technical reasons motivating the requirement to login with a Mullvad account number while already using Mullvad VPN to reach Mullvad Leta.

The Mullvad website and the https://mullvad.net/en/check page show that Mullvad already has tools to detect users of its VPN.

adultSwim• 3 years ago

Finally, a site that's more usable, instead of less, when on a VPN.

Mullvad Leta: A search engine used in the Mullvad Browser

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