Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Google's going to display wait times for restaurants in search and Maps


If you get easily hangry and impatient, Google’s new feature that lists restaurant wait times will help you plan around your hunger pangs. The update will arrive to Google search and Maps “soon.” It will show you how long you’ll have to wait to get a seat at a restaurant at any particular hour. Google says it’ll have wait times for nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world.


To access the feature, users just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and a Popular Times section will be displayed with an estimated wait in real time. You can also tap on any hour on the bar graph to see how long the wait will be for that period, in case you want to plan ahead for dinner.

There’s also a summary of how long people spend at the restaurant on average, and how long people will wait during peak times. Google says the estimates are based on “anonymized historical data,” which is how it calculates wait times for businesses like museums and grocery stores.

The feature is new to restaurants, but Google previously introduced search cards that show the busiest times for businesses and public places back in 2015. It also introduced the feature to bars last year.

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