Mullvad Leta

» see leta.mullvad.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Leta was a search proxy. You typed a query and Mullvad passed it to Google on your behalf, then handed the results back. What Google saw was a request from Mullvad instead of a request from you. The name is the Swedish verb for looking something up.

What lifted it above a simple privacy skin was the cache. Every search Leta ran was stored for thirty days and served to anyone else who asked the same thing, which meant the pool of users doubled as the pool of cover. A popular query only ever reached Google once, no matter how many people went looking for it.

It arrived in April 2023 with the first release of Mullvad Browser, the stripped-back Firefox build Mullvad put together with the Tor Project. The introduction post came later, on 20 June 2023, and set out the terms. You needed a paid Mullvad account, and it bought you one hundred direct searches a day on top of unlimited reads from the cache. Paging through results counted against the hundred.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cached web ~

A shared cache is an odd foundation for a search product. Results could be up to thirty days stale, which Mullvad said plainly in its own documentation, and for most of what people look up that is fine. News is the obvious exception.

Brave Search was added later as a second backend, selectable from the homepage next to Google. By the end there were two engines behind the proxy and one cache sitting in front of them.

~ the eight free months ~

In March 2025 Mullvad dropped the account requirement. Leta became free and open to anyone, which was the condition for making it the default search in Mullvad Browser rather than something you had to go and switch on yourself. Eight months after that it was switched off.

I never held a Mullvad account, so for most of Leta's life the door was shut to me regardless. Putting a search engine behind a VPN subscription filters out almost everyone who might have wanted one, which is a choice Mullvad made deliberately and then reversed with eight months left on the clock.

~ three weeks of notice ~

The notice went up on 6 November 2025 and named a date three weeks out. Mullvad's reasoning was that the search industry kept changing and Leta could not follow, which is a quieter way of saying that proxying somebody else's engine works only for as long as that engine tolerates being proxied. The closing advice was to use a VPN and a browser built for privacy, both of which Mullvad sells.

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