Google will soon start showing waiting time at restaurants on Search and Maps

Tired of waiting in the long queues at the restaurants? Google has a fix for you. The company is launching a feature which will show you the waiting time at any restaurant. The new feature will be available on Google Search and Maps soon.

The feature will show you how long you have to wait to get a seat at any restaurant at any particular hour. To access the feature, users just need tosearch for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and the Popular Times section will be displayed with an estimated waiting time. You can also tap on an hour on the bar graph to see how long the wait will be for that period, in case you want to plan ahead for dinner.

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 crowd. Wait time estimates are based on anonymized historical data, similar to how we compute the previously launched Popular Times and Visit Duration features.

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 labeled as “busy”, “usually busy”, “usually not busy”, etc., along with the wait time.