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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.
It’s also underselling what they are providing.
You get to skip all the AI garbage, all the sponsored links, and the “what other people are asking” sections and just go straight to the search results.
Privacy is the primary selling point, but the clean “old school” google interface is what I’m really excited about. I’ve set my default search in the browser to Leta for now.
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Gemini is wrong quite often. You shouldn’t rely on it to tell you facts.
If I need to double check it, then it’s worthless to me.
Thankfully I don’t rely on it for “facts”, just for a quick summary on something or to get a definition of a word. Something like that.
search engine
Not a search engine.
Ehhh. I mean, technically yes, but a proxy for search engine requests is probably functionally equivalent to the end user.
Also, if users don’t know that such a thing exists and goes looking for a “search engine”, they likely also want this.
One of my personal pet peeves is power stations — a big lithium-ion battery pack hooked up to a charge controller and inverter and USB power supply and with points to attach solar panels — being called a “solar generator”. It’s not a generator, doesn’t use mechanical energy. But…a lot of people who think “I need electricity in an outage” just go searching for “generator”. I don’t like the practice, but I think that the aim is less to deceive users and more to try to deal with the fact that they functionally act in much the same role and people might not otherwise think of them.
I am less sympathetic to vendors who do the same with calling evaporative coolers “air conditioners”. Those have some level of overlap in use, but are substantially different devices in price and capability.
It’s like saying a passenger rail car is a freight engine
I think they just call them trains
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.
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).
Good news, they are doing just that (in cooperation with Ecosia)
Edit: And it is supposed to be released this year (as early as Q1 apparently) https://betterweb.qwant.com/en/2024/11/08/ecosia-and-qwant-join-forces-to-develop-european-search-index/
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.
That is some unexpectedly good news. I’m looking forward to see the results of an EU based search index.
I respect the effort of creating this search engine and the effort to create a good privacy focused browser. However I didn’t appreciate the fact that the latest update to the browser set this search engine as the default.
This is also what Startpage does.
And Searx
So SearXNG?
SearXNG
Always wondered how the fuck I’m supposed to say that.
Seeks’nn’jnn?
Sur X N G?
Search engine?Searching. XNG makes the “ch” then “ng” sound in some languages.
Thus Searx was “Search”
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
@[email protected] @[email protected]I’ve never thought about it until now, so thanks for that…
I’ve said it in my head as “Seer” and then the letters X N G. I didn’t even CONSIDER part of it is supposed to sound like “search”…
Same here. XNG isn’t pronouncable in english, so it will always be Seer X N G for me
I’ve been paying for Mullvad for a while and didn’t realize this was even a thing until this announcement.
While this is nice, I would really like to see more fully independent options that are not just a proxy for Google/Bing. I realize that is a lot easier said than done, but this kind of solution is not providing a real alternative in anything but name only. Google/Microsoft fully control the APIs being used. so this only exists so long as those they are trying to provide an alternative for allow them to exist. Which will not scale if they are anything but a blip on the radar.
So is it like DDG but with EU GDPR ?
I think that would be Qwant. This is a search engine proxy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
uh-oh
Leta is not widely used.
Please everyone, help click
It seems like a good alternative so some of the most popular engines. I think I’ll stick with Ecosia, since on top of being EU based, they also make the world a better place.
Mullvad is Swedish
Your search query, IP address and iirc fingerprint gets shown to Bing everytime you make a search, so it’s not private at all
I don’t see them claiming it is
It is still a good reason not to use Ecosia, however.
Your IP address and search terms are automatically shared with our search partners, Microsoft Bing or Google, when you search.
Sorry, I left this ambiguous. My intended context was that the person you were replying to didn’t mention Ecosia’s privacy.
my bad, I always assume not just because we’re on the topic of privacy but because of how Ecosia advertises itself as a privacy friendly alternative on their front page when it isn’t that at all that, much like the difference between apple.com/privacy and apple.com/legal/privacy
But doesn’t Leta use Bing as it’s backend also?
No, it uses Google and Brave search.
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.
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!
DDG has been superb for me for a few years now often returning results I prefer over Google. I’m really pleased with it.
Nice! I’ve been wanting to get off startpage for a while now. This is a perfect replacement.
Same question. Why are you moving away from Startpage? I
They were bought by a shady company a while back.
Are you referring to Privacy One Group? Seems like that was cleared up and PrivacyTools went back to recommending them
System1 specifically, which is also mentioned in the article you linked. Privacy Tools has also lost their reputation recently. Privacy Guides is more of the standard now. I know they cleared up their position, but ads and privacy together just doesn’t sit right with me. I’m just glad there’s an alternative.
Thanks for the response!
I’ll check it Privacy Guides
Wait… what’s wrong with startpage?
They were bought by a shady company a while back.
