That's my experience as well. Gemini doesn't seem interested in doing searches outside of Deep Research mode, which is kind of funny given it should have the easiest access to a top search engine.
The Deep Research mode is on rails, but they're much more generous with it than anyone else. You run out of Claude usage almost instantly if you use theirs. ChatGPT gives you a decent number but then locks you out for a month after that.
Perplexity is still the king there in terms of the balance between price and quality. It doesn't do as many searches as ChatGPT's deep research, but you get virtually unlimited usage.
Which interface are you using for it? I use the gemini.google.com one and most of the time instead of searching it at most pretends to search and hallucinates the result.
Are you telling it to cite sources? I find that doing that helps a lot - sometimes it presents the same result multiple times with a slightly different summary each time, but at least it doesn't outright invent stuff.
