unsurprisingly, 'hg ____' shows fewer results than 'mercurial ____' for the words the parent tested

    hg - 338M
    mercurial - 30M
    hg revision - 5.5M
    mercurial revision - 1.1M
    hg version - 60M
    mercurial version - 7M

I'm seeing exactly the opposite. There's an argument to made to the effect that `hg` picks up a lot of things that have nothing to do with source control, but that's still a big difference.

Try searching for git as well:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=git%20version%2C%20m...

That's search volume. Parent was talking about search hits. I'd believe that search volume is more important, but I stand by my point in the context of this thread.