Google Starts Showing Restaurant Wait Times in Search, Coming Soon to Maps

Google on Tuesday announced a new feature in Search, one that is also coming soon to Maps. Google Search will now show you estimated wait times at restaurants, in a bid to arm you with that information before making your dining decision.

To see wait times for nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world that allow walk-ins, just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and scroll down to the "Popular Times" section. The feature is also available in India.

"There, you'll see the estimated wait time at that very moment. And by tapping on any of the hour bars, you'll see the estimated wait for that time period," Google said in a blog post on Wednesday.

You can even scroll left and right to see a summary of each day's wait times below the hour bars, so you can plan ahead to beat the crowds.

Wait-time estimates are based on anonymised historical data, similar to how Google computes the previously launched 'Popular Times' and 'Visit Duration' features.

In the case of restaurants, Google will now include a pop-up box that appears when you click on a time frame in the popular times' chart.

The box shows the live or historical data labelled as "busy", "usually busy", "usually not busy", etc., along with the wait time.

"When it comes to a delicious serving of butter chicken or perfectly aromatic biryani, people are willing to wait in (long) lines for a taste of their favourite comfort foods... Now you can decide whether that Phirni is really worth an hour wait or plan ahead to get your fix at a time when you can avoid a wait entirely," the blog post adds.

Written with inputs from IANS