Google's response, Lululemon Community

Google shared couple of blog posts last week that seem worth highlighting.

Google is experimenting with a new feature called “Web Guide” which basically looks like Google itself will write a “blog post” in response to your query but instead of links being hyperlinked (as they are in a typical blog posts), they are more prominently displayed within the “write-up”. The result looks a cleaner experience to me than current Google search experience.

Web guide uses a custom Gemini model to reorganize the results page into topic-based groups, making it easier to discover relevant web pages you might not have found with a single list of links. See it in action below:

The likely goals are to increase result quality and discovery for open‑ended or multi‑sentence queries, and to surface a broader set of websites rather than concentrating clicks on a few top links. Strategically, it also gives Google a way to add AI to search without hiding sources behind long AI summaries. This isn’t being rolled out to everyone yet; it’s still a “Google Labs” experiment but if they get positive feedback from Labs users, I can imagine this moving to default search experience.

The genie of ChatGPT is out of the bottle, and perhaps the best bet for Google at this point is to neutralize this threat to the extent Meta did for TikTok. TikTok is still incredibly popular, but once Reels got going, the incremental user and engagement growth on TikTok was an uphill battle for them. That’s what Google needs to do well: make the next 500 million DAU a very hard fought battle between Google and ChatGPT and give the existing users fewer reasons to break their search habits to try the new shiny thing.

Of course, Google engages in the query battle in two fronts: commercial and non-commercial queries but they’re closely intertwined. You cannot really cede non-commercial queries for forever without commercial queries gradually leaking to the alternatives. Amazon has been doing it for years as Google did lose a lot of share to Amazon for shopping related queries. Google is doing some interesting things here as well to stop or even reverse the bleeding.

Google launched a virtual try‑on tool in the U.S. that lets you upload a full‑length photo of yourself and see how clothing would look on you across Google Search, Google Shopping, and product results in Google Images. See the feature in action below:

Lululemon’s Community

Lululemon stock trades like death and as someone who has been bagholding it (with the unpleasant experience of watching it from +80% unrealized gain to -50% unrealized losses), I wanted to see first-hand what Lulu’s community driven experiences look like. I went to one of their “in-store sweat series” in the nearest Lulu store on Sunday morning. Two dozen people showed up at the store at 9 am (~90% women, ~10% men). There wasn’t much sweat in that session since it was focused on relaxation through sound healing. So there was lots of soothing sounds of crystal bowls and chimes. Not bad for a Sunday morning session!

I would like to go more of these sessions to get a better feel about these events. I also pay very, very close attention to Lulu’s subreddit which is incredibly active community. Frankly speaking, this community was early in picking up some of the issues Lulu had faced in the last couple of years (faltering quality, lack of newness in color, style etc.), but in the last month or so, I have sensed a slight reversal in sentiment. We’ll see in the next quarter’s earnings whether that is harbinger of an uptick in growth in North America.

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