.NET Standard is an interface of which .NET Core and .NET Framework are implementations. I agree that it's confusing terminology at first, but for daily drivers of .NET languages, it should be pretty transparent.

As a .NET dev it is transparent, but it makes it incredibly annoying to Google anything. Core and Standard are both words that might show up on any webpage and they both share the name .NET.

I've almost started wishing that Microsoft started assigning a reference guid to their products to ease searching about them since many of their products follow the same pattern of having similar names that are only differentiated by a common English word

It's somehow effectively doubled the number of search results for any one topic, only half of which will work. But you're right, for a daily user you learn quickly to treat as another criteria to sift through to get relevant results.