Something I noticed: Replit has an easy integration with Google Gemini - it helps you avoid setting up your own API keys, billing, etc. Great!
Unfortunately, it’s sufficiently hobbled compared to the “raw” Gemini API that it’s probably not worth using. It frequently returns empty strings and doesn’t support Structured Output. In addition, it doesn’t support all Gemini models. There may be other limitations I’m not aware of.
It’s a great idea, and I hope they complete the implementation.
Oh!!?? This is concerning! Do you have more details on what you’ve found to be hobbled?
And are other integrations the same?
e.g Claude, or Stripe. I have existing accounts on both and like to work in each of the dasboards to look at reports, or play with very specific controls, etc. Do the integrations remove all of this?
If they do, then I fear, as a non-hobbyist user, I will be avoiding the integrations and will continue to do my own plumbing.
The new Stripe integration is really easy to setup and you can sync with your stripe account, however you can’t deploy/publish with sandbox keys if you are using the new connector.
I’ve just come across this exact issue. This is the diagnosis from Agent:
Based on my investigation, it appears that Replit’s AI integration proxy for Gemini doesn’t currently expose the googleSearch tool capability. The model receives the request but can’t actually perform web searches - it just describes what it would do.
Options:
Contact Replit support - We can add diagnostic logging to capture the exact response, which you could share with Replit support to confirm whether googleSearch is supported and request it if not
Try a different approach with Gemini - Instead of relying on the search tool, we could have Gemini use its training knowledge to suggest likely review platform URLs (though this would be less accurate than live search)
Use an external search API - Services like SerpAPI or Google Custom Search could provide web search results that Gemini then analyzes
How did you setup the direct integration? It would be very useful to know if this will be fixed in Replit soon @support573 @support419
The easy solution is to just ask it to integrate w/ the Gemini API directly.