Mullvad VPN Debuts Its Ad-Free Search Engine

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@andrew_andrew__

Jun 20, 2023, 1:15 pm EDT
| 1 min read

Andrew Heinzman, Review Geek

If you want a privacy-focused search engine that isn’t supported by advertisements, Mullvad Leta is worth checking out. This new search engine, which is exclusive to Mullvad VPN subscribers, is still quite rudimentary. But it offers high-quality search results, it’s ad-free, and it’s audited by Assured AB.

Unlike DuckDuckGo or Brave Search, which maintain an index of unique search results, Mullvad Leta is what’s called a “Google proxy.” It fields all of its search results from Google, but it masks your identity in the process.

Additionally, Mullvad Leta maintains a cache of search results, which is shared among all users. This reduces your interaction with Google Search, and if you want, you can force Mullvad Leta to only search through cached content.

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Of course, the caching system also saves Mullvad some money. And to further reduce costs, Mullvad is limiting users to 100 direct searches per day—most of your searches will be cached (unless you’re looking up weirdly niche stuff), so this isn’t much of a problem.

I should note that Mullvad Leta is one of many Google Search proxy services. Startpage is probably the most popular option—it has a cleaner interface than Mullvad Leta, and it includes Images, Videos, and News. But Startpage is ad-supported.

Mullvad Leta is funded entirely by Mullvad VPN subscriptions, hence the lack of advertisements. To use Mullvad Leta, you must sign in to your account using your user token. Note that there is also a Mullvad Leta extension for the Mullvad Browser.

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