Comment by rahimnathwani
15 hours ago
When you called the Gemini API, did you opt in to using search grounding:
tools=[{"type": "google_search"}]
I'm curious whether in fact you were getting answers from the model weights (which is what I had assumed) or whether your API calls were resulting in web search tool calls.
Google AI person here:
Using grounding in Gemini is indeed backed by the same canonical data source for business information (like opening hours) as Google Maps. This stuff is available in its own API for a GCP fee, but we’ve built tooling to connect it to the Gemini agentic ecosystem as well.
So if I understand you correctly, Gemini has direct free access to the Google Maps API in a manner that others (people, LLMs) would need to sign up for API access and pay for?