Gemini is actually good enough for pretty much everyone I know who is not in tech and uses Android. These people are downright pleased with Google's AI summaries.
The fact that Google can push Gemini out in so many ways with their existing marketshare is mind boggling. The fact that ChatGPT hasn't lost 50-100% of web share shows it's Google's game to lose at this point.
I've been using Gemini as an advance search engine. Their main search with AI isn't that useful but Gemini is. They're the only AI online I will use and just for searching/compiling. For work/development it is Qwen3.8. Then again now that I found out Pi has a web search function I've been using Gemini less and less.
> These people are downright pleased with Google's AI summaries.
Consider me part of "those people", I guess, but are you guys not, at this point? There was a period near the start where they were bad, but I find them perfectly usable now. I'll often open a tab, Google something, and just read the summary because it's basically instant and I don't need any more than just that, a summary.
I'm genuinely confused why people take so much issue with them. Sure they're still wrong sometimes, but it's blatantly obvious when that's the case, and I can just scroll past.
They're ok. But when I use a search engine it's because I want search results. If I wanted an LLM's interpretation I'd have just asked a search-enabled LLM in the first place.
True, but I find it's significantly faster than even "instant" chatgpt, and comes with the advantage that if the summary isn't what I need, I can just scroll down to see the real results (granted, which are usually useless these days).
I agree they should make them disable-able though.
have you ever done the fun trick of asking any model to adversarially review itself? highly recommended practice for anyone who trusts a one-shot output
Sure, I've done this for more complicated questions and sometimes it reveals flaws. But I don't use Google for anything complicated. Generally it's just to get a quick vague definition of a term, pretty much.
is that functionally different than just using the search field in dictionary.com? I guess I'm just not seeing what the point of using Gemini is over a much more efficient feature that already exists
yeah i'm genuinely baffled by this too. I read this attitude frequently and I'm tending towards the conclusion that its simply a loud minority of people. I don't know anyone who acts like this in real life.
How is an LLM summary really any worse than reading through random blogs, forum posts, or reddit? Those are somehow so much more reliable? If you want authority it gives you links, and if you don't find good enough links you can ask it a follow up--no need to be coy--just straight up ask it for more authoritative sources and it will usually surface them. It's so blazingly fast relative to doing genuine naive search, I really don't see the downside.
If only they could make it be wrong less? I know they need to have these results appear in record time, but I wonder the collective damage being done by just how horribly wrong the answer often is.
Can you point an example? For me, recently, it had the wrong price for cable-car fare in SF, but it did show (2015) in the result. That seems reasonable to me, it's not horribly wrong. Other stuff it's been accurate on.
It’s good. Returns a bespoke response is some ridiculous 0.3s or something like that which is mind blowing and I have no idea how they are pulling that off at all in the first place let alone the sheer scale of it.
Lost at what, though? Waymo is gonna pan out but they sold their domain business to squarespace despite having GCP, and Google workspace deletes data when changing billing which is absolutely unacceptable.
I used to use Gemini (the product) because it's free. But its responses are so incredibly bad, and the interface has so many dumb bugs, that I stopped using it and switched to OpenCode Go models + Web UI. Gemini models can recite deep knowledge, but they can't do constructive things, can't do extended web research, can't provide more than a couple options for an answer. Either their system prompt is nerfed like crazy or the models just suck at agentic work. Even ChatGPT from 2025 was better than Gemini today.
“After three years of unprecedented investment including governments, Facebook, and Google dumping money into the promise of AI, ChatGPT still has over 50% of the traffic.”
Also, grok isn’t been on that list, further proving that no serious people use it.
The fact that Google can push Gemini out in so many ways with their existing marketshare is mind boggling. The fact that ChatGPT hasn't lost 50-100% of web share shows it's Google's game to lose at this point.
Consider me part of "those people", I guess, but are you guys not, at this point? There was a period near the start where they were bad, but I find them perfectly usable now. I'll often open a tab, Google something, and just read the summary because it's basically instant and I don't need any more than just that, a summary.
I'm genuinely confused why people take so much issue with them. Sure they're still wrong sometimes, but it's blatantly obvious when that's the case, and I can just scroll past.
I agree they should make them disable-able though.
When you search on Google now that’s exactly what you’ve done.
How is an LLM summary really any worse than reading through random blogs, forum posts, or reddit? Those are somehow so much more reliable? If you want authority it gives you links, and if you don't find good enough links you can ask it a follow up--no need to be coy--just straight up ask it for more authoritative sources and it will usually surface them. It's so blazingly fast relative to doing genuine naive search, I really don't see the downside.
Selling .coms and Donut's gTLDs? Peanuts.
Godaddy makes all their money from other stuff, and Google still does lots of other stuff. Google Workspace still prints money.
“After three years of unprecedented investment including governments, Facebook, and Google dumping money into the promise of AI, ChatGPT still has over 50% of the traffic.”
Also, grok isn’t been on that list, further proving that no serious people use it.
4.6 is a good model, by the way. Legitimately frontier-level and a good communicator.