It seems DDG handles quotes somewhat similarly to how Bing does (I just tried "input: dispatch" and got the same list of useless results from both. Google's are no better though.)
But Bing is much better for "life sucks and so do you". Strikes me that DDG just isn't "there" yet, which is the impression I've had almost every time I've used it.
Haven't done the search myself but... Novacaine for the soul?
All my search results have that exact phrase in it, just some with non alpha characters in that phrase.
I have no clue what your DDG is doing but it’s not behaving right.
Same about DDG, but since I'll never go (directly) back to Google, I set up my own SearXNG instance. So much better!
I love DDG but it's so overzealous with rewriting queries to include more (usually irrelevant) results.