If you’re a privacy-minded person, you probably resent the fact the best search results come through Google—an advertising company that feeds on your personal information and browsing habits. It’s only natural you look for alternatives.
Leta is a private search engine available for Mullvad VPN customers; importantly, it gives you Google results repotedly without the tracking. But should you use it?
Mullvad Leta is a search engine that uses Google’s API to give you Google results. When any Leta user first carries out a specific search, Mullvad caches the results for 30 days, and serves those same results to other users who enter the same query. This reduces costs, anonymizes usage, and means that Google is unlikely to ever see your search query.
You can only use Leta if you have a paid Mullvad VPN account, and while you can make unlimited cache searches, you’re restricted to 100 direct searches per day.
You can access Leta through theMullvad browser, throughhttps://leta.mullvad.net/, or by using a browser extension.
While Mullvad Leta sounds like a great idea, there are pros and cons to using it.
Pro: All Your Searches Are Protected by VPN
To use Leta, you need to be logged into your Mullvad VPN account. WhileVPNs don’t completely stop sites from tracking you, they obscure your IP address, and can make it appear that your search is being conducted from an entirely different location.
If you’re careful toobscure your browser fingerprint, don’t sign into any of your accounts, anddisable cookies in your browser, you may be fairly sure that the contents and contexts of your searches will remain secret.
Tracking companies won’t be able to add any information to your profile, so your late-night searches for online jigsaw puzzles won’t result in you being bombarded by ads for jigsaws.
Con: All Your Searches Are Protected by VPN
When you conduct a Google search, results are customized for you. Google knows who you are, where you live, and an uncomfortable level of detail about your life—regardless of whether you have a Google account.
Google knows that as a keen ornithologist, your searches for blue jays are more likely to be related to the colorful corvid rather than the major league baseball team, and will serve up relevant results and adverts.
Your results are also influenced by where you are in the world. If you’re searching for the latest news on any subject, local news outlets will be prioritized. Armenian election results aren’t particularly relevant to you if you live in France.
While this is great if you want to break out of a filter bubble, and broaden your global viewpoint, it’s suboptimal if you want useful results quickly.
Pro: Leta Results Are Great
Whileprivacy-friendly search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Qwantoffer a greater degree of anonymity, their results aren’t always the best.
DuckDuckGo, in particular, uses results from Microsoft’s Bing, and from extensive personal experience, we can state that the results, while usually adequate, don’t always give us what we need.
In contrast, Google has significantly more sites and pages in its index, as well as a very efficient infrastructure geared towards finding what you’re looking for.
By serving anonymized results from Google, Leta is far more likely to find what you need than other privacy-based search engines.
Pro: Your Site Visits Aren’t Tracked
When you click on a Google search result, you’re not actually taken directly to the web page you clicked on. Instead, Google assigns a tracking link to your click, before sending you on your way.
you’re able to test this yourself by conducting a Google search. Hover over any result, and you’ll see the true URL in the bottom corner of your browser, but right click and copy it to your clipboard, then paste it elsewhere, and you’ll notice that the link is actually a Google URL.
The exact link will change every time you search.
Leta strips tracking information for site visits, and sends you straight to the page you want.
Con: Limited Real-Time Searches
Mullvad can make 100 direct queries on a daily basis. Depending on how you spend your time online, you may find that you make more than 100 searches per day.
In the course of writing this article alone, we have conducted more than 40.
The world moves fast, and articles are updated regularly with the latest news and happenings. 100 daily searches may not be enough for you. If you typically visit the same websites directly using their URLs, actual searches might be minimal. Nonetheless, it can be a considerable hindrance (and force you to complete searches on less private browsers).
Because VPNs can help you hide your tracks online, they’re attractive to pirates and other criminals, as well as law-abiding privacy-conscious individuals.
Copyright holders and law enforcement agencies are naturally interested in seeing the records of VPN companies, in order to solve serious crimes or access evidence for prosecutions.
While manyVPN companies claim not to keep logs, Mullvad, creators of the Leta search engine, was put to the test. In April 2023, the company noted on itsblog, that officers from the National Operations Department of the Swedish Police visited the Mullvad VPN office, intending to seize computers and customer data. They left disappointed, after it was demonstrated that the logs don’t exist. That’s a big plus for users as it means the VPN provider is being up-front with what data is really keeps, i.e. little to nothing.
Leta Isn’t the Only Privacy-Friendly Search Engine to Give Great Results
Mullvad’s Leta is a well-thought-out product from a company with a fantastic reputation for privacy.
If you’re planning on purchasing a VPN subscription anyway, but aren’t sure which provider to choose, the value added by Leta could just push you over the edge towards Mullvad.
Or, if paying for a VPN isn’t something you want to do, you can host your own anonymized search engine on a Raspberry Pi!
