Out of curiousity I've ran a couple of queries in Google Trends to see what are the more popular terms in the world of web optimisation. I queried 'ab test' versus 'split test' and found the latter to be less widely used. However I was more keen to see exactly what terms people were using for 'MVT', 'multivariate', versus the old skool 'multivariable'. I thought that the term MVT would be more widely used in this day & age, or indeed be on the increase. It turns out to be far less popular than multivariate and on a par with 'multivariable'. I think it would be handy if we all stuck to a single expression, my personal preference being 'MVT'! This would certainly help for job searchs too! This particular blog gets ranked well for the term 'MVT blog' but is off the radar for 'Multivariate blog' too, so there's another side-effect to of our mis-aligned industry terminolgy! : )
UPDATE 16th August 2011: Whilst Google Trends is still a good tool for examining terminology usage or just trending full stop a far better tool for this job is Google's Keyword Tool . Obvious really : )
