Making our lives easier one technological advancement at a time, Google is implementing a new feature that will let users know about restaurant wait times in search results.
Just this past January, Google Maps rolled out another food-related update, highlighting both how crowded a restaurant is in real time and the expected crowd size per hour. Now, the technology goes a step further to tell you how long you'll have to wait to get a table.
The company predicts that it will be able to offer wait times for almost a million restaurants all over the world. The feature, which will start going live today on desktop and mobile, will first be available on Search and, not long after, it will expand to Maps and include grocery store listings.
Here is how to make use of the new feature: Search for a restaurant on Google, click on the "popular times" tab and you'll get a snapshot of how busy the eatery is—data that will then be translated into table wait time. Planning ahead? Click on the time of day that you're planning on visiting the spot and Google will predict the table wait time by using a "cache of anonymized historical data."
Are dinner reservations officially a thing of the past?