I had that same thought myself. I was getting such bad results on ddg I assumed I was doing something wrong. I thought, maybe two decades of using Google trained me to search Google vs search the web.

I gave it so many chances and even tried to change my search terms to adapt to ddg and possibly get better results. Nothing seemed to work.

When I tried kagi, I immediately was getting usable results. That said, i also find myself perusing the results and trying stuff further down the results than I ever would with Google.