Thinking about this some more, I suspect the issue might be the *type* of searches that lead people to this blog. That is, the kind of searches that bring people here are searches for keywords like: Java, iPhone, software development etc. However, there are other categories of search altogether e.g. “local search” where people are looking for a completely different type of information. For those kind of searches, I think people are much more likely to use other search engines.

“Almost everyone I know uses Google; and almost no-one I know uses Yahoo, or Microsoft; ”

I was assuming that you had UK mostly UK centric friends!

When it comes to your own web stats - you had the advantage of knowing where your hits were coming from….:-) Have your tried splitting by search engine versus browser ( ie affected by browser default search engine? ) or country or OS?

I guess it might be that the kind of people that read this blog (those with an interest in technology) tend to use Google more than the rest of the population.