Plan to eat out this evening, wouldn’t it be nice if you knew beforehand about the wait times at the restaurant you plan to go to? Google is making it possible.
The search giant is working on a new feature that will show the expected wait times at the restaurants worldwide in its search results and on Google Maps. This is going to be an extension of the company’s already available Popular Times feature, which shows when a business gets the most customers and what is the usual rush at any given point of time of the day.
According to Google, to use the new feature, just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and scroll down to the Popular Times section. There you’ll see the estimated wait time at that very moment. You can also tap on other hour bars to see the wait time during those hours. The company is using historical data to extrapolate the wait times.
Google notes that the feature will first be rolled out to Google Search, followed by Google Maps. The company hasn’t shared a fix date for the release, but keep an eye out for it to go live over the coming weeks.
In related news, the company has also announced that knowledge graph data in Google Search will now offer more details about the publishers. According to the company, it will now show the topics the publisher commonly covers, major awards the publisher has won, and claims the publisher has made that have been reviewed by third parties. This information should help in identifying the credibility of any publication, which is increasingly becoming important in era of fake news and social media manipulation.
