Google to show restaurant 'wait' times on Search, Maps

San Francisco: Tired of long queues at restaurants? Relax as Google is soon rolling out wait times on Google Search -- followed by Maps -- that will show you the estimated wait-time at your favourite eating hangouts.

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 said in a blog post on Wednesday.

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.