It's because their main business (ads, tracking) makes infinite money so it doesn't matter what all the other parts of the business do, are, or if they work or not.
Google are well-known, like Meta, for making products that never achieve any kind of traction, and are cancelled soon after launch.
I don't know about anyone else, but I've never managed to get Gemini to actually do anything useful (and I'm a regular user of other AI tools). I don't know what metric it gets into the top 2 on, but I've found it almost completely useless.
I agree they aren't building great user products anymore but gemini is solid (maybe because it's more an engineering/data achievement than a ux thing? the user controls are basically a chat window).
I asked for a deep research about a topic and it really helped my understanding backed with a lot of sources.
Maybe it helps that their search is getting worse, so Gemini looks better in comparison. But nowadays even kagi seems worse.
Kagi has their own AI assistant that let's you choose any model from the major, and some not so major, providers. You can even hop between them I the same chat. It is also able to search for results using Kagi. This includes any lenses you could configure.
It's worked extremely well for me. Their higher subscription was less than ChatGPT + Kagi. I haven't used Gemini on its own interface yet to compare, though.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I feel I have a great example. Replacing the Google Assistant with Gemini has made my phone both slower and less accurate. More than once have I said "Hey Google, Play <SONG> by <ARTIST>" and had my phone will chirp back the song is available for streaming instead of just playing it. Once, I even had it claim it wasn't capable of playing music, I assume because that's true on other platforms.
The most spectacular failure was when I asked it to make a logo for a project. The project has "cogs" in the title but that refers to Cost of Goods Sold not the physical object, so I specified that it should not include a cog a in the logo. Of course, it included a cog in the logo.
I asked it to help me create a business plan. Partway through it switched to Indonesian language, for no reason I could see. Then, after about two hours work on the plan, with about 200K tokens in the context, it stopped outputting anything reasonable.
I have tried to get it to help with Google Sheets formulae about a dozen times so far. Not once has it actually got anything right. Not once.
It's serviceable as a chatbot, but completely useless if you try to get it to actually do anything.
Gemini just eclipsed ChatGPT to be #1 on the Apple app store for these kinds of apps. The 2.5 pro series is also good/SOTA at coding, but unfortunately poorly trained for the agentic workflows that have become predominant.
> When you call a business, the person picking up the phone almost always identifies the business itself (and sometimes gives their own name as well). But that didn't happen when the Google assistant called these "real" businesses:
No, because if you read the article you'd see that there's more, like the "business" not asking for customer information or the PR people being cagey when asked for details/confirmation.
