Gemini will search the web for most things (at least if you are using it via the web search interface), it isn’t limited to the knowledge it was trained on. Actually, I’m a bit mortified that not everyone knows this. If you ask Gemini (from the search interface) about a current event that happened yesterday, they will use search to pull in context and work with that. Also about model that was released yesterday, it can do that.

It’s only a very low level model access where search isn’t used. Local models also need to be configured to use search, and I haven't had a use case to do that yet.

Gemini seems to call this “grounding with google search”. If you have Gemini installed in your enterprise, it will also search internal data sources for context.