StartPage and Ixquick, sister search engines that offer private searching, announced that they surpassed four million daily direct searches on Monday.
The announcement comes about three weeks after the parent company announced that they reached three million daily searches for the first time.
Ixquick CEO Robert Beens credits the higher search activity to public reaction to the ongoing NSA/PRISM surveillance scandal.
People are making major changes in their on-line habits and looking for ways to protect their private information from US government surveillance. Our fans especially appreciate the fact that we are a Dutch company, which means we are not directly subject to the US Patriot Act. And of course, we have never participated in any program like PRISM.
DuckDuckGo, another alternative search engine hanging its hat on private search, has also seen record search activity in recent weeks.
Of course, despite those gains, search activity at these smaller search engines is a drop in the bucket compared to what Bing and Google see every day.