alt Hacker NewsI consistently have exactly the opposite experience. ChatGPT seems extremely willing to do a huge number of searches, think about them, and then kick off more searches after that thinking, think about it, etc., etc. whereas it seems like Gemini is extremely reluctant to do more than a couple of searches. ChatGPT also is willing to open up PDFs, screenshot them, OCR them and use that as input, whereas Gemini just ignores them.
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Same, I use chatgpt plus (the entry-level paid option) extensively for personal research projects and coding, and it seems miles ahead of whatever "Gemini Pro" is that I have through work. Twice yesterday, gemini repeated verbatim a previous response as if I hadn't asked another question and told it why the previous response was bad. Gemini feels like chatGPT from two years ago.
Are you uploading PDFs that already have a text layer?
I don't currently subscribe to Gemini but on A.I. Studio's free offering when I upload a non OCR PDF of around 20 pages the software environment's OCR feeds it to the model with greater accuracy than I've seen from any other source.
I agree with you. To me, gemini has much worse search results. Then again, I use kagi for search and I cannot stand the search results from Google anymore. And its clear that gemini uses those.
In contrast, chatgpt has built their own search engine that performs better in my experience. Except for coding, then I opt for Claude opus 4.5.
Perplexity Pro with any thinking model blows both out of the water in a fraction of the time, in my experience
I will say that it is wild, if not somewhat problematic that two users have such disparate views of seemingly the same product. I say that, but then I remember my own experience just from few days ago. I don't pay for gemini, but I have paid chatgpt sub. I tested both for the same product with seemingly same prompt and subbed chatgpt subjectively beat gemini in terms of scope, options and links with current decent deals.
It seems ( only seems, because I have not gotten around to test it in any systematic way ) that some variables like context and what the model knows about you may actually influence quality ( or lack thereof ) of the response.