[scbrg]

So, for anybody else who wasn't familiar with the term GOAT, and don't want to spend minutes fighting search engines all too eager to tell them about goat cheese, it apparently means to Greatest of All Time.

Please explain obscure or very domain specific acronyms.

[MVorlm]

GOAT isn't obscure or domain specific and is a very common acronym used online for almost anything competitive and doesn't need any more explanation.

[scbrg]

My apologies. I'd never seen it, and since it was in the context of chess, I included that in my searches. There was lots of information about cheese, and lots of questions about who the GOAT was, but not what it meant.

Interestingly, my comment got a handful of upvotes before it was modded to oblivion, so apparently I wasn't alone in not knowing this very common acronym.

I'll try to be more American next time I'm on the Internet.

[OrderlyTiamat]

That is actually an amusing but interesting failure mode for search, linking "GOAT" to "goat" and "chess" to "cheese" is pretty natural, but totally misleading in this case. I wonder if there's a good solution (for google/ddg/etc users) for that beyond just putting everything in quotation marks, as that doesn't seem to help much anymore.

[skinkestek]

We could point it out and pester Google employees with how dumb it has become in every discussion where it is brought up.

I've been doing this for a while and it now seems I'm getting some support.

The last few years however I have given up Google and after using DDG for a few years I'm now testing out Kagi and I am happy to say that not only is the business model much better aligned with me as a user, but the results also seems to be significantly better than both Google and DDG now.

[beermonster]

I hadn’t heard of the term before but since it was in all caps I searched for ‘GOAT acronym’ and the first match was on the money. Obviously searching for goat is going to find lots of stuff about goats.

[magpi3]

Obviously it did in this case. I think the use of GOAT is common in the U.S. but not elsewhere, and HN draws an international community.

[nvarsj]

It’s common in esports, internationally.

[l33t2328]

It’s common in all sports internationally.

[simion314]

>GOAT isn't obscure or domain specific and is a very common acronym used online for almost anything competitive and doesn't need any more explanation.

I learned this only a month ago, I am wondering if this is a new thing? I am not from US so maybe this term is used a lot on TV/radio/speech but not used as much in writing(blogs,news not sure about social media/memes) so it could explain why I never known about this until recently.

[maxiepoo]

I think it's been popularized by the NBA fandom and the incessant Lebron James vs Michael Jordan debates.

[simion314]

So I only had 1 contact with this and it was indeed about sport , something like "football player X is the GOAT" and I had to have this explained to me. so it might be a sports only term, since I am not watching or reading sports then it makes sense I do not see it used.

[CamelCaseName]

My experience using Google:

"goat meaning" -> first result

"goat acronym" -> first result

"goat definition" -> first result

[beermonster]

Same on DuckDuckGo too. Which is how I found out about the, before-unheard, term. Only saw it being used in Chess articles during the World Championships.

[carl_dr]

If you are in iOS, it does a good job of finding acronyms for you. Long press “GOAT”, then select “Look up”. The answer is the second item listed.

[OrderlyTiamat]

I'd recommend searching terms like "GOAT abbreviation" or "GOAT acronym" in such cases, both of which have explanations as first result for me. Otherwise, searching GOAT on wikipedia and going to disambiguation also has it under "other uses". wikipedia's disambiguation can be a bit overwhelming with long lists of other possible meanings, but it's usually helpful enough.

[mysecretaccount]

Google "goat acronym" and don't leave this comment next time and you'll save many minutes.

[WoahNoun]

It is neither obscure nor domain specific. Unless you consider all of sports to be domain specific.

[avalys]

This isn’t really obscure or domain-specific, though.