We don't mind newbie questions at all. But maybe also take a look at our Help section which has loads of helpful explanations as well as some videos in Getting Started.
The word search box looks for occurences of the word in the recipe title, book title, author name, and ingredient list. You are much better off combining a word search with the filters on the right side. Filters allow you to include any combination of ingredients, recipe type, ethnicity, special diet and occasion/course. So for your goat search you would include the filter Ingredient / Meat, Poultry & Game / Other meats. You will now only see recipes containing goat meat. Likewise if you only wanted to see results with goat cheese and not goat meat you would include the filter Ingredient / Dairy / Goat & sheep cheese.
I'm not sure why the -cheese in search didn't work - I will investigate that further. It works if you add -"cheese" but it should also work with -cheese. But again, you are better to make exclusions using the filters. You select the ingredient type you want to exclude - Ingredient / Dairy / Goat & sheep cheese - and click the green + to change it to a red -. Now all recipes containing goat cheese are excluded.
Using filters are much more accurate than word searches since the filters are data which is fixed whereas word searches have lots of variables. For example by entering goat cheese in word search it is only looking for instances of those words. Whereas a filter by goat cheese also finds chevre, chevrotin, and every type of goat cheese. There is a Help section on Using the filters.