I don't think it's surprising. The only place I hear talk about DDG is on this website and a few blog posts.

I tried it myself based on all the glowing comments here, but I didn't find it to be particularly impressive (not bad, but not great either). I also found myself using '!g' most of the time because the default results were inferior to those returned by google; in the end I just cut out the middleman.

So I guess I just don't get all the hype about DDG on Hacker News (same goes for bitcoin and the never-ending stream of Python non-stories). Maybe there's a cult-ish aspect to it?