With Google Search and Maps you can now determine your favorite restaurant’s wait time. Up to a million listed sit-down restaurants are available with this feature. You simply “just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and scroll down to the Popular Times section” and voila, estimated wait time is instantly displayed by tapping on any of the hour indicators.
With the feature you can determine if the restaurant is busy or not, by the hour or for the selected day. The restaurant’s current wait time data is determined through anonymized historical data:
“To determine popular times, wait times, and visit duration, Google uses aggregated and anonymized data from users who have opted in to Google Location History. Popular times, wait times, and visit duration are shown for your business if it gets enough visits from these users. You can’t manually add this information to your location, and it appears only if Google has sufficient visit data for your business.”
