[staticman2]

I don't know that I've ever seen someone recommend Gemini Advanced for "search". My experience is the model doesn't always tell you if it's using search or it's internal training, in fact I'm not sure if it even is "searching" the internet rather than accessing some internal google database.

In comparing it's performance to the pure model on Google AI studio I realized Gemini was presenting some sort of RAG results as the "answer" without disclosing where it got that information.

Perplexity, which is hardly perfect, will at least tell you it is searching the web and cite a source web page.

I'm basically saying Gemini fails at even the simplest thing you would want from a search tool: disclosing where the results came from.