+1 to service unavailable annoyances.

It has been close to unusable for anything serious. I did really like the ability of Gemini-pro models to ground their research using Google Search. This meant that they were often much more thorough and up to date in their recommendations and finding solutions that came to life after the models themselves were trained. But even using Gemini as a reviewer was a weak point in my harness because of the poor reliability of their service (529 or 503).

I’ve since paid for a search API(linkup, exa, and valyu) and hooked them up to Deepseekv4-pro. It has been doing a stellar job.

The key was to prompt them to systematically use search to validate their answers(not simply “use the tool”, but something like find possibilities using web search, then once you formulate a solution, validate it with this check list -

1. Is there a better way to do this in 2026?

2. Are the libraries and its docs you’re using up to date?

This seems to help very much based on experience.