Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.

Typical example:

"Where can I buy <thing I'm looking for that I can't find anywhere using normal search terms>?"

> You're looking for <related but different and widely available thing>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of>.

"No, that's different. I'm looking for <that thing but with the exact differences spelled out again>."

> Ah, my mistake. You're looking for <thing I described>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of but which don't actually sell it>.

"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."

> I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out <more sites I've never heard of>.

"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."

> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at <yet more sites including some of the same>.

"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."

> Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy <thing it first thought I meant and that wouldn't bring me any closer to solving my problem>.

(ad nauseam)

LLMs can actually be a good fit in this application if a better search engine feeds them a list of candidate websites that might sell the thing, and the LLM drives a web browser to see if any of the websites have it.

The few times I've resigned myself to asking Gemini or ChatGPT something I couldn't find an answer to, my experience has been the same. 100% of the time. An LLM has never, not once, given me a correct answer or not lied to me. It's always been the same experience you describe. It goes in circles "Try X... Try Y... Try X?" Until I tell it to stop telling me X or Y, and then it goes, "LOL you can't do that at all, I was just wasting your time."

Most recently, I was considering moving away from iterm2 on MacOS, and I wanted to know if any other terminal emulator supported gestures for switching between tabs. So I asked Gemini, and it says, "Yes Ghostty supports gestures for switching between tabs."

"Ok I just installed Ghostty and I can't find anything about gestures."

"You need to add foo=bar to your conf file."

"I added foo=bar to my conf file and now it's saying the conf file is invalid."

"Sorry bro, remove foo=bar and add baz=boo to the conf file."

"It says baz=boo is invalid too."

"baz=boo isn't a real option. Remove that and add foo=bar to your conf file."

"You already told me to do that and I already told you that doesn't work."

"You shouldn't put foo=bar or baz=boo in the Ghostty conf file. Both are invalid. Ghostty doesn't support gestures. Have you considered iterm2?"