I like to think I’m a pretty strong search engine user, and for a long time I’ve realized that you can’t have just one search engine in your arsenal. Google is great, Google is humungous, and Google can give you the web world if you want to dig through the results. I use Google several times a day, in different ways, but there are more specialized web searches I do that I now do not use Google for.
Those searches primarily are about organizations and locations. I’m not going to give away EVERYTHING we do in search, but I will say that we’ve found that DuckDuckGo can be much handier for getting mailing addresses than Google. There are times that you have qualifiers and required expressions within a search that Google will still present 180 results when you know there’s really only a couple of legitimate ones. DuckDuckGo seems cleaner. It may not be as complete – but sometimes the search you’re putting in requires a deep cut of specific data, and sometimes it requires a shallow cut of specific data.
Like any search engine, you need to play around with a search to hone the results you get. But I find it a useful tool for this specific need. I won’t deny that I use Google for about 80% of all my search needs, but DuckDuckGo is one of the others that I will use depending on the search requirements.
A side note: clearly there are quite a few folks that have discovered DuckDuckGo in the past couple of years, based on their usage report.