I have heard a few people say things like this, but I have been using ddg for years and I think I could count the number of times I got nothing back on the fingers of one hand, and those were times I was using incredibly specific search terms +"leprachaun eating marrow" +gif -funny or whatever (haven't tried that exact search but you get the idea).

Occasionally I try google search to check and I virtually never think google's results were better. But I'm guessing a lot of that is down to how you do search-fu, what you're actually looking for and subjective stuff about ranking quality.