Back in 2015, Google introduced a featured in Google Search that showed you when a retailer, bar, restaurant, or other location was the most popular. The Popular Times section in the place’s listing featured a graph that let you see at what time might be best to visit to avoid crowds. Today, Google is upgrading this feature with a real-time representation of how popular a place is at the moment.
As you’ll see in the GIF below, Google has tagged the Popular Times section as “Live” and with a pink bar in the graph of the current time. This should show you in real-time if a place is busy and whether or not you may want to avoid it. You can also report to Google if they are incorrect on the level of busyness.
Happy hour, easier than ever to decide upon, thanks to Google.
Additionally, Google has added in an estimate as to how long people typically stay at a location. The idea here is to help you plan around timing, assuming you need to get to multiple places or be back home at a certain time.
Finally, search results will now show hours of operation broken out by departments or special services. For example, some restaurants have separate hours for restaurant and bar sections, as do retailers for their specific areas, like pharmacy drive-thrus vs. the rest of the store.
To see these new options, just search for a place you are thinking of visiting.
Comments
21 responses to “Google Now Lets You Check How Busy a Place is In Real-Time”
It doesn’t seem to work for rural areas or smaller towns and cities, at least not up here in Mendocino County in Northwestern California. I get the usual busy times info, but nothing live.
This is great. I love this feature of Google Maps
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I’d be interested to know exactly how they determine these statistics.
Using peoples device locations? The “Live” number is based on the number of devices at a specific location at the current time I’m guessing? Doesn’t sound like anything overly complex when considering Google’s location services.
Aggregated data from check-ins and location history of opted-in users, mostly.
So this data is essentially one of the returns on letting Google drain your battery to maintain its location history.
It’s been sounding for a while now
I don’t mean to sound anti-Google, but if I owned such a place (restaurant, coffee shop) I’d be pretty pissed that there was a service that told the public how busy my place was. It may deter customers away.
Perhaps, but I like information
I think this is great. Some customers don’t want to go to a place that has an hour & a half wait especially when staff is now trained to downplay the actual wait time not to deter customers. People don’t pay for crowds & long waits (unless it’s an amusement park), they pay for a service.
Right – as long as they know the crowds are already there. But I think once most people show up and have to wait, they figure all other places are just as busy so they might as well stay there and wait.
I think if anything it would increase business. If there is a wait your facility is insufficient for the amount of people you have to serve and you arent making any money off the people waiting whether it is 5 people or 200. But, if you are slow, and people can see there won’t be a wait then google is actually helping you fill empty tables.
I think it would all depend on the context of the place of business and the reason for the visit. If I need to purchase something and see that one place is busy, and another is not – the first place lost my business.
If a customer really wants to go to one particular place no matter what and is willing to go another time, then yes it may increase business. But to me the most public of places this service will have data for will be the first example. Just a guess.
I tell you, there are boo birds no matter the subject. Would it be possible that if I know on a Friday night at 7 that the olive garden will be busy, but if I also wanted to go to a movie, then it would be great to know how busy, so that I could adjust my movie time? Just because I know a place has a long wait, doesn’t automatically mean I’m not going there. Typically, it just means I can plan my time a little better.
Could also help you better decide when to staff more employees to cover peak business times and get faster service for customers.
I believe business owners can opt out of this. Or at least they used to be. I don’t manage any g+ business pages anymore so I can’t really check it, but I know this was an option at one point.
Maybe – but it could do the opposite. It could draw customers in when you’re not so busy. It probably all comes out in the wash.
As a business owner, I’d be happy to know: when to place deals and how to more effectively schedule staff.
As a business owner, you should have the ability to find this info on your own, based on sales or staff reports.
Good point. Then the value of this would be to compare those who purchased something to “abandoned carts” or number of visitors to your physical location. Staff reports and sales reports do not have the data to report this intel. This would be more common in a mall where they sold me a space based on “foot traffic”. I can compare “foot traffic” and sales to “actual traffic” and try to learn more about my customers’ needs.
Couldn’t you say the same thing for any review service?