It’s Friday night and you’re going out with your significant other. You show up to the restaurant at 7:00 PM sharp, only to be told that you’re going to have to wait an hour to be seated. It’s a scenario we’ve all had to deal with, but thanks to Google’s latest innovation, wait times might soon be a thing of the past.
On Tuesday, Google announced on its blog that wait times for restaurants will be rolling out on Google Search soon, with an update coming to Maps in the future as well. Once the new feature goes live, all you’ll have to do is search for a restaurant, open the business listing, scroll down to the Popular Times section and tap the appropriate hour bar to see what the estimated wait time is (or will be if you’re planning ahead).
You can also scroll left and right to see what wait time you should expect on different days of the week. Friday night will likely be busier than Tuesday, for example, so you’ll see different estimates depending on which day you choose. These wait times aren’t live, but rather are based on anonymized historical data for each restaurant.
Google says that the feature will support over one million sit-down restaurants when it becomes available. This is actually the second most useful feature that Google has unveiled over the past week, as it is now possible to compare phones with a Google search as well. Now if only Google’s phones would work properly.
