Best ways to determine if a domain has been previously abused?

I have noticed a few times when trying to research domains to purchase, a domain that has a decent backlink profile, no spammy backlinks, no visible history of spammy pages on the internet archive and only the homepage is indexed in Google.

But then I will search site:domain on duckduck and see some indexed pages that look spammy.

So it makes me wonder if there are other things that I'm missing leading me to accidently purchase a bad domain and worse start using it for links.

What else should I be using or doing to validate domains, especially ones that have recent chunks of time missing on the internet archive?