For me DDG shows a fact card at the top about Franz Kafka, linking to the Wikipedia page about him. After that comes the search results, of which the first one is about Apache Kafka.

I see the same on DDG, but Bing has Franz first for me.

DDG's userbase is also pretty particular, though.

Your average DDG user is somewhat privacy conscious, so they probably know much more about tech tan your average Google user, and are a lot more likely to be a programmer than anybody studying literature.

If you base your algorithm purely on what results get clicks (but not on who clicks them), you essentially target your average user.

I think it's just the combination of a direct match in a subdomain name, the popular and widely linked to domain name, and lack of any other context in query.

I don't remember whether DDG does anything to the scores it gets from Bing. They might, but then - taking into account how particular its users are... - the poor Franz K. would be on the third page, far behind even a Kafka library for Franz Lisp. (No, that's not a thing. A shame, I know.)