Google’s command of information will soon extend to picking restaurants. The tech giant plans to roll out an update that will display realtime wait estimates for restaurants directly on business listing pages, allowing people to see how long they’ll have to wait for a table.
Users will have access to this feature through Google Search, and eventually Google Maps, The Verge reports. To use it, people can search for a restaurant, pull up a listing, and see a bar chart with popular times for that particular place, along with a realtime estimate for how long it will take to get a seat. The feature will also reportedly allow users to click on a timeframe in the future to see an estimated wait time for that period, which will be based on data pulled from Google’s Location History, as Tech Crunch reports. This data already informs estimates for how much time people spend at specific restaurants or businesses.
While there is not a specific launch date for this new feature, Google insists it its “rolling out soon” and will provide information for “nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world that allow walk-ins.”
Yelp already provides a similar feature through a partnership with Nowait, in which it displays wait times at restaurants and allows users to join a waitlist for a seat without being present at the restaurant.
• Google will soon display wait times for restaurants in search and Maps [V]
• Yelp's Newest Feature Eliminates Long Restaurant Waits [E]
