Ditto. Been using DDG for daily for years. It's far from perfect but this does not sound remotely familiar.

User manuals for stereo systems, specs for old hardware. Anything that can be generically referenced, maybe a bit harder to find. Someone can throw up a webpage that SEO's on "manual" or "user guide" and when I type in "Sony DTH-345 user guide" I'll see results like "manualsonline.xyz" that are clearly bogus.

I can't lab it up now, but that is the gist. And DDG has it while Google rarely has the same level of it.

Isn't DDG just Bing's index with privacy (and some other QoL) features?

That's my understanding. And while I appreciate that Bing is the "baseline", I would be interested in what it would take for them to do additional cleanup on results. Blacklisting domains should be a no-brainer. "Safe search" for suspicious sites, not adult theme.