Has anyone considered that the slightly longer and forgettable name DuckDuckGo might have something to do with the low mainstream presence? I think they should rebrand and market with duckgo or maybe just duck.com if at all practically possible.
We do have a short domain "http://ddg.gg" although it is worth noting that duck.com is owned by Google and points to their main search engine. So it's not really an option for us.
It's not necessarily nefarious, the domain came from some unrelated acquisition, but they didn't have to make duck.com point to Google.