I've realized that the Gemini action within Flow does not currently have the option to control search grounding (the ability for Gemini to do Google searches to supplement its training data).

It would be nice if users were given the ability to control this.

I feel like the current state is that search grounding is not enabled. This makes sense as a default, but it severely limits the ability of Gemini to optimize answers to certain types of questions. The tool won't be able to answer many types of question very well if this is the case.

If search grounding is always enabled, that makes simple prompts cost 100X more than necessary (the $0.14 cost of grounding overwhelms the token costs for simple prompts).

This seems like something users should be able to control.

It also seems like it would be a simple addition. The UI could just be a simple tick box (defaulted to unchecked/off). On the back end, it seems as simple as adding {"google_search": {}} in the API payload's tools array if the box is ticked.

I hope this is considered and implemented.

The AI actions within Flow are a real game changer. Adding the ability to have AI do thinking steps within a largely deterministic / algorithmic process vastly expands the number of business processes that can be automated efficiently.