Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that DDG has even a percent of a percent of Google's brand recognition. The fact that we are even discussing this shows what sort of a bubble we are in. The vast vast majority of users in the real world don't know or care about DDG.

No matter what your opinion of the company, Google's brand reputation is well earned and pervasive, and it started and was built from scratch, as opposed to DDG which basically stuck its own logo on Bing's API.