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Comment by iphonecorridor | Hacker News Reader

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!

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Is this a extra flag or config, or an internal MCP tool? Or do I just hit Flash Lite 2.5 with web search questions?

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).

(I work at Linkup.) We do both: search returns raw results, no summaries, and there's a separate fetch endpoint that returns the full page as markdown, with optional JS rendering. You should compare us against your Perplexity setup - you might some value in switching

Put in the todo list to check out. If you cut web search costs even further for flash/fast search (similar to Perplexity, which is $1 per 1000 for fast search) would make it more competitive (at least for my app!)

I believe 2.5 lite will be deprecated on the 20th or so. Recently had to move to newer models at work.

Edit to add that my ai scientists currently use google’s vertex for web search and grounding as well as firecrawl.

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).

No raw results unfortunately.

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.

> 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.

The idea i do want to give them… guys, differentiate your Gemini models with free to low cost search. It’s what your known for! Lean into it.

Not joking: They need to figure out how to sell ads for agents first.

Google Search only works as a business because human eyeballs see (and brains choose to click on) ads at rates that justify advertisers’ (massive in aggregate) dollars.

"Google Search" isn't the business you're talking about there even, you're talking about the ads business, separate from Google Search. Search, as Google has implemented it, isn't a "business" at all, that's why they have to subsidize it with money from their ads business in the first place.

If Google instead spun out Google Search into it's independent company, with actual focus on search instead of whatever they're doing now, with an actual business model, it might actually work, granted they get back the old search quality.

Kagi is an example of search engine that manages to also be a business today and not theoretically.

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".

The LLM does the searching but is still limited

Hm thanks, if my search results have to go through Gemini 2.5's brain, that's not the best

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

I believe they're referring to the free tier of Google AI Studio. [1]

[1]: https://aistudio.google.com

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

Google AI's deprecation page [0] says that there is "No shutdown date announced" for gemini-2.5-flash-lite.

(Was your comment a joke? Or did google announce this through different channels?)

0: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/deprecations

Banner right under the title :

https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...

Ah, they are shutting it down on the agent platform, but the API will still work. That makes sense.

Also if you use a newer API key (I think mine is from like Feb of this year) then you'll get a "this API key is too new to use 2.5" message.

That’s the enterprise agent one, still available for API. Oh and I got it wrong… it’s actually 1500 searches per day free! Gemini Flash 2.5 also has this btw but I prefer Flash Lite to reduce costs. It’s nuts when you compare cost and features to any of the 3.x models. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing

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