I tended to get this impression with DDG because I use !g or !b only when I am dissatisfied with a ddg result, but !g seems worse than !b despite the expected overlap between ddg and Bing. Of course if you get adequately niche then Google should find something and not have spam, but I think they turned results off for anything sophisticated enough to return few results.

Get your employer to pay for Kagi. It has honestly saved me several days in search time over the last 1,5 years.

The most prominent feature for me is that it only shows 0 or maybe 2 search results when there really isn’t more to find. It’s freeing, honestly.

I used to verify it with a Google search like you, only to be confirmed every time. I haven’t been doing that for a while now :-)