[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.