Google Debuts Restaurant Wait Times on Search, Maps

In a blog post, Google announced that it would make estimated restaurant wait times available on Google Search, Google Maps (coming soon) for prospective diners.

"Now you can decide whether that cronut 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 read.

To see wait times for nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world that allow walk-ins, diners simply search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and scroll down to the Popular Times section. There diners will see the estimated wait time at that very moment. And by tapping on any of the hour bars, diners will see the estimated wait for that time period. Diners can even scroll left and right to see a summary of each day’s wait times below the hour bars–so they can plan ahead to beat the crowds.

Google’s new restaurant wait times comes from the aggregated and anonymized data from users who opted in to Google Location History – the same data that powers popular times, wait times and visit duration.

According to TechCrunch.com, "Google is at least partly challenging existing apps like NoWait, which is handy for seeing restaurant wait times. But unlike Google, NoWait also lets you put your name on the list for those restaurants that don’t take reservations."