It was one of those boring meetings where your body is technically in the room, but your brain has already gone wandering. This happens to me A LOT.
I had my phone in my hand and, for no useful reason at all, wondered what the traffic on my digital garden looked like over the past week. I haven't posted in a while, so curiosity got the better of me.
What struck me most was the amount of traffic coming from DuckDuckGo.
According to Umami, I had 324 visitors in the past 7 days, and 37 of them had arrived from DuckDuckGo. That was around 11% of my traffic, which genuinely surprised me as I only had 1 visitor from Google. I knew people used DuckDuckGo, of course, but I didn't realise it was sending that much traffic my way.
Then I started wondering about the people, and therefore the reason, behind those numbers.
Are DuckDuckGo users the indie, slightly boho searchers of the internet? The people who still bookmark odd little websites, read personal blogs, avoid the algorithmic sludge, and prefer the quieter corners of the web?
For a brief moment, I really liked that idea, I often think of myself in those ways, so it felt like I was talking to my people.
A digital garden isn’t really a standard corporate website. It isn’t a polished marketing blog either. It’s a scruffier thing than that, well mine is anyway. A personal corner of the web. Half notebook, half archive, half “I’ll come back and tidy this later”, which admittedly is three halves, but that sum feels about right for my digital garden.
And maybe the people who seek out these spaces are also the kind of people who choose alternative search engines. People who are a bit more intentional about their digital footprint. People who don’t just default to Google because it’s there. People who are still curious enough to look beyond the usual platforms.
That was my first theory ... then, with curiosity still surging inside of me, 10 minutes later I dug a bit deeper into the stats and slightly ruined my own romantic idea.
It turns out that around 92% of the DuckDuckGo traffic was landing on one page: my Pinter brewing times page.
Out of curiosity, I searched for “pinter brewing times” myself. On DuckDuckGo, my page was showing in positions 3 and 6. On Bing, it was also sitting around position 3. On Google, it was nowhere to be seen.
That made the whole thing even more interesting.
Most of the other results on DuckDuckGo and Bing were from the official Pinter site. So my scruffy little garden page, written from actual batches and real experience, was sitting among the official results as one of the few non-brand answers to the question.
Someone searching for “Pinter brewing times” probably doesn’t just want the official answer. They can get that easily enough. What they really want is the unofficial answer. The lived-in answer. The “I’ve brewed this myself and here’s what actually worked” answer.
That’s where personal websites like mine still have a place, they can answer the awkward little questions brands don’t always answer properly. They can add the human bit. The experiment. The note in the margin. The small practical detail that only appears once someone has actually used the thing in their own kitchen.
Because someone searching for real Pinter brewing times probably isn’t just drifting around the indie web looking for quirky little blogs. They probably already own a Pinter. They probably have a brew fermenting somewhere in the house. They probably want to know whether the official brewing times are enough, whether other people are leaving it longer, and whether their beer is about to turn into something drinkable or something they’ll quietly pour down the sink.
In other words, they’re not browsing. They’re trying to solve a problem.
And that might explain the DuckDuckGo thing better than my original “boho indie web” theory.
If you’re searching for something like Pinter brewing times, Google can feel a bit noisy. You get adverts, shopping results, official pages, old forum posts, and content that may or may not have been written by someone who has ever actually brewed the thing. But a person searching on DuckDuckGo might be looking for something a bit more direct. Less polished. Less commercial. More “has a real person tried this, and what happened?”
That’s exactly what my Pinter page is.
It isn’t a sales page. It isn’t a polished guide written to shift units. It’s just me, my own batches, my own brewing times, and my own attempts to work out what makes the beer better.
There may also be a crossover between the kind of person who homebrews with a Pinter and the kind of person who uses DuckDuckGo. Gadget-loving hobbyists. Tech-minded professionals. DIY types. People who like tinkering with things at home and finding their own way through a problem rather than simply accepting the official version.
Which, now I think about it, is basically me.
I like gadgets. I like brewing beer at home. I like fiddling with things until they work better. I also decided to build my digital garden on Blogger, which is not exactly the obvious choice in 2026, so perhaps I’m not in the strongest position to accuse anyone else of avoiding the conventional route.
There’s a search engine quirk in there too. DuckDuckGo has its own crawler and uses a number of sources, but its regular web results are largely sourced from Bing. When I looked a little closer at my Umami dashboard, Bing was performing fairly well too, with around 6.5% of all traffic.
So perhaps my little garden, or at least that Pinter page, has found a comfortable home in that particular part of the search world, while Google continues to stand outside, peering through the hedge, deciding whether anything here is worth indexing properly.
I quite like that. For me, Google can keep looking and wondering.
The DuckDuckGo traffic doesn’t necessarily mean my garden is being discovered by wandering citizens of the indie web. Not entirely, anyway. It might simply mean that practical people, searching with slightly different tools, are finding a practical page that gives them something useful.
And honestly, that might be better, because the more I think about it, the more a digital garden should work like that. It shouldn’t just be a place for grand thoughts and half-finished essays. It should also be a place where one oddly specific note, written from real experience, helps someone else at exactly the right moment.
Maybe that’s the real point here ... not that DuckDuckGo users are all indie web romantics. Not that my garden has suddenly become a destination for privacy-conscious digital wanderers. But that a page about brewing times, written by someone who has actually brewed the beer, can still cut through.
Even if it does so via DuckDuckGo and not Google!
And honestly, I’ll take that any day for my tiny little digital garden.
What moved the pot: The first bit of movement came from small, useful, easy-to-post products. I started with hosepipe connectors bought from Tesco, then used the money from early sales to buy more small clearance items.
One of the better early results came from Oral B brush heads bought from the Tesco clearance aisle. They were bought for £8 and sold for £13, and one pack sold the day I listed it. That is the sort of product that makes sense in the early stages: small, known brand, easy to post, and not too hard for a buyer to understand.
I also added a few old bits from the shed, including drill bits and small unused ratchet straps. These were effectively free stock because they were already paid for and not being used. That makes the profit calculation slightly strange, but it is still real cash if they sell.
Lesson: at this stage, small and boring can be beautiful. The best early products are light, useful, non-breakable, easy to describe, and cheap enough that the buyer does not need to think too hard.