I often use Gemini free web chat because it's generally quite good at web search-related questions (apparently it has direct token-level access to the Google Search index) but I noticed in the last two weeks output quality of 3.5 Flash seriously degraded. Maybe they were switching over systems.
Google's Knowledge Graph is a massive advantage no other competitor has. I don't think they've fully utilized its full potential but I don't know if any other company could've built something like Scholar Labs