Google recently announced that it will soon roll out a new feature to Google Search, followed by Google Maps, that will show you the estimated waiting time for area restaurants. This recent addition is an expansion of Google’s existing feature which shows businesses’ busy times.
Google’s new restaurant wait times also come from the aggregated and anonymized data from users who opted in to Google Location History – the same data that powers popular times and visit duration.
In case of restaurants, Google will include a pop-up box that appears when you click on a time frame in the popular times chart. The box shows live or historical data labeled as “busy”, “usually busy” and “usually not busy”, along the wait time.
People can also scroll left and right to see a summary of each day’s wait times below the hour bars so that they can plan ahead to beat the crowds.
This new feature will be supported on nearly a million sit-down restaurant listings worldwide, initially in Google Search.
Here’s what you can expect to see:
“You’ll see the times in the restaurant listings on both mobile and desktop. It will then come to Google Maps to Android, at which point it will expand to include grocery stores”, says Google.
