Submitted 3 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
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.
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.
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
But doesn’t Leta use Bing as it’s backend also?
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?
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)
That is some unexpectedly good news. I’m looking forward to see the results of an EU based search index.
Good moves from Ecosia. They used to get some flack for using Bing and Google.
Mojeek (UK-based) is trying. I wasn’t super impressed by their index yet, though.
Someone explain to be why this is better than using DDG or Qwant or SearX?
It’s not, but it is better than using google
Honest question: how can it be better to search Google through a proxy than using Google? You’re still feeding the beast?
‘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.
Finding a searxng instance and entering a random search term, the first 10 pages of results all came from google.
Checking the preferences, there were 4 search, and 6 of the other toggles enabled.
Even enabling all engines and rerunning the search, the first 13 results were listed as google
Is it meaningfully different from this offering if all the results it picks seemingly come from Google?
If I disable all but mojeek and qwant, all the results came from mojeek
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
Surely it has to be the paid APIs. You can’t build a service hoping Google won’t notice your bots running searches.
I guess you would need a lot of proxies. And they probably need to be on Googles good side to keep their VPN extension in Chrome
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.
Can you please link to the paid Google API you’re talking about? I wasn’t aware they had an API for web search.
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.
It probably depends what you’re looking for, but I find DDG to have fewer up-to-date results than Google.
I think Kagi si better than Google, but under the hood it just mixes results from Google, Bing and Yandex.
Kagi have their own index too.
Aren’t there a lot of engines that already do this
So SearXNG?
SearXNG
Always wondered how the fuck I’m supposed to say that.
Seeks’nn’jnn?
Sur X N G?
Search engine?
Search’ng?
Searching. XNG makes the “Ching” sound in some languages.
Probably the last one, I guess it’s kinda like nginx
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”…
I pronounce it like it’s spelled, searksng.
I just say that as SearchesNG
@Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
@sibachian@lemmy.ml
@AnotherPenguin@programming.dev
@catloaf@lemm.ee
@fatboy93@lemm.ee
So…I guess it kinda seems like a .gif vs .gif sorta situation, we’ll never come to a consensus, there will forever be disparate camps chuckling under their breath at all the “idiots” that can’t even pronounce SearXNG right…the fools…
Well, guess I’ll sleep on it and join a camp some day… le sigh
I’ve been paying for Mullvad for a while and didn’t realize this was even a thing until this announcement.
Nice! I’ve been wanting to get off startpage for a while now. This is a perfect replacement.
Wait… what’s wrong with startpage?
They were bought by a shady company a while back.
Same question. Why are you moving away from Startpage? I
They were bought by a shady company a while back.
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.
If only there were a search index I thought was still good.
Its cool seeing the Mullvad team keep pushing forward with privacy related services. If I ever need to search Google with JS turned off, I’ll use…SearXNG, but this is cool too.
This is also what Startpage does.
And Searx
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 things 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.
what URL do I set for suggestions?
I actually thought this is what Startpage was already doing essentially
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 that search engine as the default.
No images and news categories?
paste url has an extra 25 in it. thx for the info tho!
LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 months ago
Not a search engine.
tal@lemmy.today 3 months ago
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.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 months ago
It’s like saying a passenger rail car is a freight engine
theherk@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.