Gemini API File Search is now multimodal

(blog.google)

100 points | by gmays 8 hours ago ago

14 comments

  • FrequentLurker 7 hours ago

    This might be great and all but I am still miffed at how simple search on AI Studio is. You can only search the titles of your conversations and nothing inside them. On top of that they messed with the scrolling so Ctrl+F doesn't work reliably.

    • pants2 4 hours ago

      It's incredible how far behind Gemini has gotten, both the product and the model. Even the ChatGPT plugin for Google Sheets blows away the native Gemini integration.

      Everyone thought Google was pulling ahead with Gemini 3. For a minute there they had the best language model, image model, AND video model in the world. But it's like they decided to pull over for a nap while OpenAI and Anthropic flew by.

      • diegoperini 39 minutes ago

        I have the opposite experience where Gemini (even the flash models) has the only useful model for my reverse engineering related use case. My hunch is Google utilizes its free access to entire Google search indices to train itself from niche non-English speaking community websites, much frequently and in a "relevant" manner, which in the end gives these models the most up to date info for this particular kind of work. Every other model is just either 10 years outdated with their answers or simply hallucinates like waaaay crazy.

      • comboy 2 hours ago

        3.1-pro is still very capable, and API is at competitive price vs e.g. Anthropic, they just can't seem to figure out RLHF and harness. It needs a lot of guiding, it tends to be lazy and poorly sticking to instructions by default.

        It just feels like many google products really, they are capable of really amazing things, it's just that nobody there seem to care. I would guess they are likely optimizing more for internal use than their vast userbase.

      • wilj 4 hours ago

        I just cancelled my Gemini subscription yesterday. I have a big private fork of OpenCode, and I did it the wrong way to start with, so I couldn't pull from upstream.

        So I put together a plan for refactoring it, step by step, with tests, etc. After literally 8 solid days of fighting with Gemini 3 Pro, I still couldn't pull it off.

        I gave GPT 5.5 a chance with the same prompt, plans, and repo. I'm not sure how long it took, but when I checked in on it a few hours later it was done. All tests passed, everything exactly how I'd asked, and better (it made some improvements).

      • thefounder an hour ago

        I never felt Gemini was ever better than the OpenAI or Anthropic. I think it’s more on par with open source models than the top 2

    • qingcharles 4 hours ago

      I've come across a few weird search issues like this with Google lately. Entire company built on the best search engine ever created; can't do search properly in their apps.

    • sega_sai 2 hours ago

      The search in Gemini app in the browser is so embarrassingly bad that I get an impression that nobody of importance in Google must be using it otherwise they would have fixed long ago.

    • stingraycharles 5 hours ago

      Yeah, it’s surprising, Claude Desktop has had project files since decades which are chunked/indexed and automatically injected into your context based on the topic.

      You’d think this would be fairly obvious for Google to do, but it’s probably an organizational problem rather than a technical one.

    • varispeed 2 hours ago

      I am more miffed that you cannot delete conversations.

    • greesil 7 hours ago

      Too bad they can't just easily vibe code new features.

      • bloqs 3 hours ago

        Yeah, what happened to no more SWE

  • FirstPoint an hour ago

    It’s a striking irony that the world's leader in search is receiving so much heat for poor search functionality and UX within its own flagship AI products

  • trilogic 4 hours ago

    Good to have a choice between clouds and local use.

    How much would you pay to have this yours forever, running locally, GDPR and HIPaa compliant, without the headache of privacy or subscriptions.

    That´s what we offer with HugstonOne and we did it before Google. Multimodal, Lighting fast RAG, terabytes not kilobytes only :)

    All you need is a 32gb ram laptop and HugstonOne, not a rocket science.