A beautifully sourced answer isn't the same as a properly checked supplier. That's the distinction I care about with Gemini Notebook, and I think it gets lost precisely because the product's basic idea is sensible.
It's Google's document-based AI research tool. You add material, ask questions and get answers tied to your sources. That gives us something much more useful than a chatbot offering an impressive opinion from somewhere in the fog.
But a citation tells you where an answer came from. It doesn't tell you whether the right evidence made it into the notebook.
I like a research assistant with boundaries. I don't like pretending those boundaries describe the whole business.
The brochure has cleared the brochure
Imagine a founder comparing two software suppliers. Into the notebook go their proposals, product pages and sales presentations. The question is whether either supplier can handle a complicated business requirement.
That's a perfectly reasonable starting point. It becomes a ridiculous finishing point if nobody adds the support correspondence, exceptions or qualifications that might contradict the polished pitch.
The brochure has investigated itself and would like to thank the brochure for its cooperation.
My starting assumption is that the official story is the version somebody paid for. A supplier benefits when its chosen evidence becomes the entire discussion. An AI tool doesn't have to invent anything to help that happen. It can faithfully organise a very incomplete story.
That's why I find the fixation on whether AI makes things up slightly comforting for the wrong reason. It's an obvious failure we know to look for. An answer built from genuine but selectively chosen documents can look far more respectable.
Nobody needs to fabricate the awkward paragraph if it never gets invited.
What actually gets through the door
Gemini Notebook's import rules make this concrete. When it imports Google files, footnotes and comments don't come with them.
Think about what that means in our hypothetical supplier review. If a qualification sits in a comment on a Google document, the main text can arrive without it. Asking the AI to find every qualification won't recover something the import left behind.
That's not the machine being stupid. It's us asking a librarian to explain the book someone removed from the shelf.
Web links have another boundary. Importing an HTML webpage takes its text, not its images, embedded videos or the pages linked underneath it. Paywalled webpages aren't supported. Adding a supplier's homepage doesn't mean you've added its entire website, never mind everything worth knowing about the company.
A public YouTube video comes in through its transcript. That's useful for what was said, but a chart shown without being described isn't the same thing as spoken evidence. The route into the notebook matters as much as the link you recognise.
I don't read those limits as an argument against the tool. I read them as an argument against calling an upload a completed investigation.
There are useful conveniences too. Imported Google Drive sources can update automatically, so this isn't simply a complaint that every notebook is a stale photocopy. Fresh material can still be incomplete material. Automatic updating won't turn an excluded comment into included evidence.
Better questions aren't extra documents
There's a second distinction worth keeping straight. With many sources, Gemini Notebook retrieves the information it judges relevant to your question and builds its response from that. A more specific question helps it find the relevant pieces.
So I'd separate two jobs that are easy to muddle. First, deciding what evidence belongs in the notebook. Then, asking useful questions about that evidence. Better wording helps with the second job. It can't repair the first by magic.
In the supplier example, a useful question might ask which supplied documents describe the requirement, what each one actually promises and where they disagree. That's narrower than asking whether the supplier is trustworthy. It's also much closer to something the source material could support.
I wouldn't turn a missing answer into reassurance. If the notebook can't find a restriction, the honest conclusion is that it hasn't found one in the material available. That's a reason to check the original documents and ask for anything missing, not permission to declare the restriction nonexistent.
My guess is that Google benefits when a useful place to explore documents starts feeling like the place where the business knows things. That makes its tools harder to leave. The buyer benefits only if the convenience doesn't quietly replace the effort of deciding what belongs there.
I don't need another beautifully organised room in which nobody asks who chose the guests.
For me, Gemini Notebook makes sense as a way to interrogate a defined bundle of material. It doesn't earn the right to call that bundle complete. The business opportunity I find more convincing is helping people see the gaps, not dressing a selected pile of documents as certainty.
The valuable product isn't a filing cabinet that talks. It's one that tells you which drawer nobody opened.
Who gets paid to find what's missing?