I get the opposite effects on google. As an example, I tried to search for the documentation on watcom’s wasm assembler. It kept giving me results for web assembly no matter how I modified the query nor the Boolean search operators. To me it’s a symptom of search engines trying too hard to be smart and predictable.

Keep in mind that if you take only a specific type of searches to Google, in this case the ones DDG struggles with, it may just be that Google is good at that class specifically (like natural language or a query doing well with long literal string matching or something) and that makes it appear more competent while others, using Google all the time, are annoyed by it a lot of the time