I have had the polar opposite experience. After many unsuccessful trials of DDG in past years, I recently switched my default engine to DDG about 2 months ago on all devices (desktops and mobile). Since then, I have been pleasantly surprised. I would say I end up prefixing !g (to redirect to a Google search) once every 200-500 queries. For the remainder, the DDG results page is such a welcome change from Google’s, which basically has gradually morphed from its original 10 links only into a glorified link farm run by a surveillance megacorp.