Google location cards now tell you what times restaurants are at their busiest

In a never-ending quest to make its search engine as robust as possible, Google has now added a new feature to the cards it gives us in Google search that applies to businesses, restaurants, coffee shops, and the like. If you search for something like “Starbucks” you’ll now find that towards the bottom of the location card is a section that shows popular days and a break down of the times that generate the most foot traffic. The data here is based around “historical visits” to the location, and so actual accuracy may vary wildly.

As you’d expect, the new feature doesn’t apply to every restaurant or business you search for. Even a few of the Starbucks nearby didn’t happen to have enough data to generate the “popular times” list. Of course, just like any Google feature, we can expect more businesses to incorporate the feature in the days, weeks, and months to come.

For those that regularly frequent the same coffee shops and restaurants, this new feature probably won’t be that useful to you, as you probably have a pretty good grasp of “busy times” in your area. Then again, this could be a welcome feature to travelers, or for those times when you are trying some place new.

This server-side change is now working for both web search and directly from the Google search app, no app update required.