Skip the line: Google Search, Maps to soon show restaurant wait times

Google is soon going to roll out a new feature to its Google Search and Google Maps that will show you the estimated wait-time at your favourite eating hangouts.

"Rolling out soon, wait times on Google Search (and coming soon to Maps) shows you the estimated wait at your favorite restaurants. 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,"Google said in a blog post on Wednesday.

To see wait times for nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world that allow walk-ins, just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing, and scroll down to the "Popular Times" section.

"There, you'll see the estimated wait time at that very moment. And by tapping on any of the hour bars, you'll see the estimated wait for that time period," Google added.

You can even scroll left and right to see a summary of each day's wait times below the hour bars, so you can plan ahead to beat the crowds.

Wait-time estimates are based on anonymised historical data, similar to how Google computes the previously launched 'Popular Times' and 'Visit Duration' features.

In the case of restaurants, Google will now include a pop-up box that appears when you click on a time frame in the popular times' chart.

The box shows the live or historical data labelled as "busy", "usually busy", "usually not busy", etc., along with the wait time, TechCrunch reported.