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.

Gemini gives you 50 Deep Research queries per day on the $20/month plan. I've yet to run that limit.

Yeah, I've been keeping Perplexity around since I get a $5/mo education plan and it gives access to everyone's models (plus search) at once.

That does not match my experience at all. Basically any Gemini query will run a search.

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.

I can explicitly tell it to search and it won't.