Google Does Two Things. AI Made One Better and One Worse.

People use Google for two completely different things, and Google has been quietly pretending they're the same thing for years.

The first is questions. "Can you take ibuprofen and Tylenol at the same time?" "What causes inflation?" "How long does a passport renewal take?" You don't know the answer. You want information, and any of several sources might have it. The results page was built for this, and AI has made it genuinely better. An AI summary of drug interactions is more useful than ten blue links about drug interactions.

The second is navigation. "Costco membership." "Santa Monica map." "Southwest airlines." You're not asking anything. You know where you want to go and you're using Google to get there, the way you'd use a phone book — not to research phone books, but to look up a number.

For a long time, Google handled both of these well enough. The right site usually showed up first, you clicked it, and you were there. AI broke that balance. Not because AI is bad at its job, but because building a better answer experience meant expanding the results page into something larger. Now when you type "costco membership," you get an AI overview of membership tiers, a knowledge panel, some sponsored results, and eventually the Costco link somewhere below all of that. For a question, that page would be an improvement. For navigation, it's just more to get past.

I built Right2site to restore the balance. Type "costco membership" and Right2site takes you directly to costco.com/membership. Type "santa monica map" and you're on the map. The navigation case works the way it used to.

What happens when you land is the part I like most. A small overlay appears in the corner with an AI summary of your search, the next few top results, and a link back to full Google results if you need them. So you haven't given up anything. You get the direct navigation when that's what you meant, and you get the AI answer right there on the page you were trying to reach. Both things, in the order that actually makes sense.