Not directly covered by this blog, but for low cost and good performance the combination of gemini-3-flash with search grounding is hard to beat, at least for the many small experiments I use it for.

One thing touched upon in comments here: I never understood how it was proper for 3rd parties to scrape Google search results and reuse/resell them.

Really off topic, sorry, but I am surprised that more companies don’t build local search indices for just the few hundred web domains that are important to their businesses. I have tried this in combination with local (small and fast) LLMs and I think this is unappreciated tech: fast, cheap, and local.