Mullvad: Shutting down our search proxy Leta

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/shutting-down-our-search-proxy-leta

by holysoles • 9 months ago

218 126 9 months ago

mullvad.net

holysoles2• 9 months ago

For anyone looking at alternatives, I've been a user of searxng for awhile and have found it to be pretty solid.

backscratches• 9 months ago

Submit a query to a random instance via https://searx.neocities.org (which is set as my homepage).

BrenBarn3• 9 months ago

This has the same problem that most public searxng instances seem to have nowadays, which is that they don't work. Either you just get an error about rate limiting or you get results totally unrelated to your search. I just tried a couple random searches about geographical locations (in English) and got back a bunch of results in Chinese.

mac-attack2• 9 months ago

Mullvad Leta was an engine of choice within SearXNG for my self-hosted instance. Disappointed to see it go.

t0lo2• 9 months ago

i love searx but i wish it could include yandex as well- then it would be perfect- dumb wars

BrenBarn3• 9 months ago

I had been using baresearch.org (a searxng instance) but it's recently become unusable, apparently due to the engines it aggregates cracking down on such things. I tried some other instances but they also don't work. It's a bummer because I thought searxng was pretty great for the last year or two.

holysoles2• 9 months ago

I've been selfhosting my own to avoid this issue. Once in awhile a search provider will be unavailable but its pretty consistent in pulling in the major ones.

It doesnt require many resource and would be easy enough to run it on docker compose alongside a valkey/redis instance. I have mine on k8s but i dont think there is a helm chart easily found.

stevage• 9 months ago

What exactly did it do? And why can't it do that anymore?

supriyo-biswas• 9 months ago

Most likely that people are switching to LLM based search products in droves and the real demand is there.

therein• 9 months ago

Maybe you are but people are certainly not switching to LLM based search products in droves.

It is the exact opposite for me. Everyone hates the LLM based search products in my circles. Just look at this shitshow.

https://imgur.com/a/lAd3UHn

s_ting765• 9 months ago

Or search companies are forcing LLM products on visitors and claim "see! everyone is using our AI search instead of the regular search".

netfortius• 9 months ago

DeepSeek seems to go the way of trying to please everybody. They offer two alternatives. which you could use separately or both in the same time (named in an obvious way): DeepThink and ... well ... Search :)

r721• 9 months ago

Launch thread (5 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116503

rollulus• 9 months ago

That was a “people who missed the launch discovered it later”-thread. The launch was 2.5 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35964397

culi3• 9 months ago

It's a privacy proxy for searching on Google, Brave, idk if they have others. It strips away any tracking info

Searx is a similar idea. More powerful but definitely uglier

Taek• 9 months ago

Sad to see it go, at the same time I never used it and it seems that the rationale is highly pragmatic, so you certainly won't find me protesting the decision.

Privacy is an uphill battle, we should use our efforts where they make the most impact.

mkatx• 9 months ago

Damn.. I just learned about this.

charcircuit3• 9 months ago

Similar privacy can be achieved through the combination of a VPN and a privacy-focused browser.

Mullvad sell a VPN and privacy-focused browser so how are they unable to proxy the searches themselves? They already have the needed tools developed.

jdiff3• 9 months ago

A VPN and a privacy-focused browser have similar practical usefulness to a private search engine. They cannot be used to create a private search engine.

charcircuit3• 9 months ago

Yes, they can. You use the browser with the VPN to search sites like Bing and then scrape the search results.

culi3• 9 months ago

The browser is free btw and a great browser. Basically Tor without all the Tor protocol parts

jsheard• 9 months ago

It always seemed like Leta was on thin ice since it queried Googles Search API and then cached the results for 30 days, which I believe is against Googles TOS. I wonder if they finally noticed and got mad.

https://developers.google.com/terms

you will not [...] keep cached copies longer than permitted by the cache header

benatkin• 9 months ago

They didn't get mad. Part of Google's playbook is openwashing, where they act open in order to get more people to lock into their tech.

themafia• 9 months ago

Part of Google's playbook is openwashing

I think it's easier to just call it "lying." Nearly to the point of "breaking the law."

t0lo2• 9 months ago

fair enough- i used it a few times but brave was just more convenient- also for everyone here brave does its' own indexing and you can downrank and uprank sites and it will remember it without an accout

mouse-5346• 9 months ago

How has your experience with brave been privacy wise? Do they have an advertising network? Do they have sponsored search results or data harvesting?

geokon3• 9 months ago

a bit tangential but has anyone noticed a serious degredation in quality with duckduckgo? its become completely unusable and ive had to switch to Bing :(

My guess is search's days are numbered and companies are "pivoting" away to other projects

a shutdown is preferable to silent bitrot

eviks• 9 months ago

But ddg is just Bing? How is it worse?

geokon3• 9 months ago

i dont know their internals but its very clearly not. You can try side by side. Extremely basic searches fail. It seems intermittent and inconsisent. Maybe their backend to Bing fails and the fallback is terrible. Just guessing

Right this moment it seems to work. 2 Days ago Id search for something basic like "CSS colors" and not get back a single usable result

AnonC• 9 months ago

DuckDuckGo has always been bad or just adequate for some specific purposes. Though it’s been my default search engine for a long time, I do use the “!g” bang command on the search query to switch to Google when I find that DDG’s results aren’t relevant or adequate.

In the last year or so, I look for the summaries from “Search Assist” and the dive into a chat with the (limited?) LLM models that it provides. It’s my go to for LLM usage. It’s rarely and for more complex needs that I go to ChatGPT.

duttish• 9 months ago

Whenever ddg returns shit results for me and I try !g I still get shit results, but with more ads. I've stopped trying !g since a couple of years now.

Wonder what's different, it seems people's experience differ quite a lot.

Cerium• 9 months ago

I switched to Kagi a few years ago and have not looked back. The quality has been great and continues to perform well.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 9 months ago

Is location aware search usable now? The answer when I was using it like a year ago was... no

rectang4• 9 months ago

I recently bought a DDG subscription because of their duck.ai service.

For $10/month it’s great to have someone whose incentives are aligned with my own managing my relationships with AI companies I’d otherwise have to monitor constantly for privacy abuses.

I haven’t noticed a recent degradation in DDG’s search results, but I’m also turning to duck.ai more frequently and on the whole my search/investigation experience is better.

The one significant downside is that duck.ai limits the length of your chats, but considering the price that’s not surprising.

The direction I’d like to see the industry go is better integration of search results into AI chat, blurring the distinction between the two. That would make both products more compelling: search results are made more friendly with AI summaries, and original sources help to counter AI hallucinations and obsequious blather.

lossyalgo9• 9 months ago

AI is killing websites[0]. Why visit a website if the AI summary is good? But soon, if everyone is only using AI results, then there will be no reason to create new websites, unless you don't care about anyone visiting your site except for AI crawlers.

[0]: I won't bother linking any articles since there are too many articles on the subject and whatever I link is probably not the site you want (or is maybe paywalled).

subarctic• 9 months ago

I switched to brave search a year or two ago and found it to be an improvement

Aurornis• 9 months ago

I have DDG set as the primary in some places and Google as the primary on other devices, so I’ve used both in parallel for years.

To be honest, DDG has always been far behind Google. It’s fine when I know my search result is going to be in the top 10 of any engine I use, but the moment I need to search for anything non obvious I don’t even bother with DDG any more.

DDG does seem marginally worse today than it was maybe 5 years ago. It falls off rapidly past the first few results. Now it even seems like it just starts mixing generic results from some popular adjacent keyword into the results and hopes we don’t notice as users that it stopped trying to search by page 2.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 9 months ago

I've started to wonder/worry that maybe it's not the search engines (excluding Google, I won't apologize for them). What if there's just nothing to search for? If there is little on the internet besides trash and a few big portals? Much of what you might be searching for whether you know it or not will be a reddit post, or Facebook, or Stackoverflow. And some of those places don't even allow for proper indexing by crawlers. Worse than that nightmare fuel is the idea that 2025 just isn't the same internet as we grew up with, where everyone was racing to shovel as much real content onto it as they could... today it's a bunch of grifters hoping to be influencers or Youtube personalities or skeevy scammers AI-generating slop but not much else.

And so, even if Google was the same thing it was back in 2010, there's no longer anything for "search" to find. And I hope you all downvote me to -50 and scream at me for being a retard with some snarky-assed abuse detailing how and why I am wrong. Because I don't want to be correct about this.

zelphirkalt2• 9 months ago

Maybe the issue is not DDG itself directly, but that the web has become more shit and more inaccessible SPA nonsense.

lossyalgo9• 9 months ago

That's weird to hear. I've been using DDG daily since years and it's gotten progressively better, though lately every search engine's top results are often AI generated trash. To combat this it seems that DDG recently added a feature to every link in the upper-right corner to "block this site from all results" which is something I've been waiting for since SEO optimizing trash became a thing.

BrenBarn3• 9 months ago

What I have noticed is how slow it is to load versus other search engines. It's not much in the scheme of things but it's noticeable.

dackdel• 9 months ago

i use kagi and duckduckgo. between the two i get my work done

csomar• 9 months ago

My guess is search's days are numbered and companies are "pivoting" away to other projects

Pretty much. Most (all?) search engines have basically stopped indexing the web. If you create content that doesn't make it through social media and has significant links, Google won't just index your website.

No, it's not under-ranking your site. It's plainly not indexing it. So if you have weird, specific content out there; it simply won't show up for a particular search.

Search is pretty much over and no one is interested in getting that fixed.

ThePowerOfFuet• 9 months ago

Kagi. Seriously.

ajdude• 9 months ago

I stopped using duckduckgo and switched to kagi shortly after the tankman fiasco[1]. Never been happier- if you want to support the continued existence of search, then pay for it.

[1] Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo 560 points by MaxHoppersGhost on June 4, 2021 | 126 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

yegg3• 9 months ago

We never blocked this image and we would have no incentive to either since we’ve been banned in China since 2014. Here’s my statement from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27528324

dvntsemicolon2• 9 months ago

I just switched to Kagi. It's great

RamRodification• 9 months ago

Kagi uses Russian search engine Yandex (EDIT: among several other sources) to produce search results, which means they pay them, which means indirectly sponsoring Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

There are more or less valid arguments for not excluding Yandex[1], but as a European, I want to avoid any of my money going to Russia if possible. And there is no setting to exclude Yandex from your Kagi search results.

If you stopped using duckduckgo because of the tankman fiasco, maybe you should reconsider if Kagi is right for you.

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

InsideOutSanta• 9 months ago

Second this. I finally gave up and subscribed to Kagi half a year ago, and man, I should have done it much sooner. The search results are just genuinely good.

This is not like trying to use Bing, and then half the time you have to do the same search on Google because of how poor Bing's results are. It feels like Google felt fifteen years ago: useful results without all the "sponsored links" garbage around it.

mrweasel• 9 months ago

I would recommend trying Ecosia, their search have become really good. Better than DuckDuckGo, Bing and Google to be honest. They use a mix of Bing, Google and a few other things, most recently their own index which they collaborate on with Qwants (only for German and French at this point).

Originally I switched due to their environmental focus and the way they run the company, but the quality of the results keeps me there. They have their own ! query, like DuckDuckGo. So !maps for Google Maps and !w for Wikipedia.

fwn• 9 months ago

While I like the general idea of Ecosia (in that it's a less harmful ad-funded service) they do share user IP addresses with their search partners (Google and Microsoft).

We, and our search partners, collect your IP address in order to protect our service against spammers trying to conduct fraud or to up-rank specific search results.

Src.: https://www.ecosia.org/privacy

This shouldn't necessarily stop anyone; I think it should just be mentioned when it is suggested as an alternative to DuckDuckGo. You probably wouldn't switch from a search engine that proxies all favicons to avoid tracking to one that sells your identity to Google and Microsoft for tree-money.

pogue3• 9 months ago

I've found Brave Search to be quite good. You can disable the AI summaries if you prefer. However, I generally find them very helpful. It's, of course, private similar to DDG. They use their own crawler as well as getting results from Google and other sources.

https://brave.com/search/

pythux• 9 months ago

Hey, thanks for the kind words. I just wanted to clarify that Brave Search is 100% independent and doesn’t source results from any third -party (see here for more details: https://brave.com/blog/search-independence/)

Disclaimer: I work at Brave

web3-is-a-scam• 9 months ago

All of the brainpower is going into AI.

Im expecting a future where we dont have “pages” on the internet anymore, but its just the backbone for generative AI content and if you want to promote your brand you need to pay the AI providers to put your content in responses.

Eventually, the entire notion of “searching the web” will be seem as archaic as the rotary phone.

yegg3• 9 months ago

All our different search metrics have been up over time, so would love to know more about specifics if you'd care to reach out to me (email in profile) and we can look into it more deeply.

chongli2• 9 months ago

How do metrics tell you that a search query produces the result the user really wanted rather than fooling the user or forcing them to settle or even give up? A lot of my queries involve clicking a link and then realizing the site is garbage and just closing the tab.

yupyupyups• 9 months ago

Many times it has given me a list of all mainstream news networks rather than what I searched for.

1970-01-01• 9 months ago

The degradation is on all search engines. Nothing is as good as it once was. Even the pay-for-it search engines are catching junk and floating it to the first page.

powerapple• 9 months ago

I have not searched many times these days, I just use mostly ChatGPT..... I don't even verify its answers

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe• 9 months ago

I too have noticed a trough in recent months and decided to make the jump to pay for kagi. Been really happy with it and the incentives are aligned.

johnisgood2• 9 months ago

Best search engine to find DMCA'd content?

IlikeKitties• 9 months ago

If you want good search results, open up a tor browser and use yandex.ru. The difference in search result quality is eye-opening.

Still hope Russia looks like Berlin in '45 soon but until then, you can't deny they got the better search engine.

donohoe• 9 months ago

I use Mullvad for VPN and how no idea they had this! Are there other services should I be aware of?

Ylpertnodi• 9 months ago

Mullvad browser.

wafriedemann• 9 months ago

more important than a proxy is having an alternative to google because it is crazy how much they censor search results. just add brave search as a secondary.

dvntsemicolon2• 9 months ago

Yeah I expected that to happen eventually. It's a shame.

jeanlucas• 9 months ago

Well, I called it out 5 months ago. It wasn't viable. :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44117601

Mullvad: Shutting down our search proxy Leta

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