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iphonecorridor • today at 12:06 PM • 7 replies • view on HN

For those developers out there, the best is still Gemini Flash Lite 2.5 believe it or not. It gives you 1000 google searches per day for free. Compare to Flash Lite 3.x which is 5k PER MONTH and then a few pennies PER SEARCH. Nuts. Didn’t realize search was so expensive.

Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.”

It’s really really good for low cost search!


Replies

apwheele • today at 1:12 PM

So I wish I could use Google for https://veruscite.com/, but the number of Google searches are a hard cap on the account! So yes that is fine for agentic coding, but for an app that relies on web-search is not sufficient.

I am currently using Perplexity fast search and fetch, and I am happy with that. I would try our Ceramic.ai, but I need to be able to fetch the pages as well (I do not want summaries).

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karmakaze • today at 2:10 PM

Can Gemini Flash Lite 2.5 be made to return raw search results. Some 'search' providers I looked at returned summaries, or vector relevance matches (of presumably a smaller/stale page set).

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jsemrau • today at 4:06 PM

I can't use Google for anything anymore.

1. Google News API now returns only Google links that don't resolve to anything in code. 2. Google Search results are atrocious and only unearth non-authoritative blogspam and aggregator sites.

rvz • today at 12:13 PM

> Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.”

Don't give them (G) ideas.

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winter_blue • today at 5:39 PM

Is this with the $20/mo Google AI Pro plan?

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stavros • today at 2:01 PM

Can someone clarify how this works? Why does an LLM give me a search API? The search APIs I've always used were just "post query, get JSON".

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iancuandrei • today at 12:46 PM

"This model is being retired on October 20th, 2026"

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