It's all about the tags. You have to work in the other direction. Find something well-tagged, then giphy the fully qualified tag that produces the same gif every time.

Granted, this is not a "search engine" type of use case, but the actual existence of some gifs, and the tags applied, force a degree of compromise.

You nailed it. See my comment from yesterday, it's the same for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11113644

Same here, useless 90% of the time.