[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.

[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.

[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.