Google Can Now Show You The Best Time To Pick Up Your Dry Cleaning

Waiting in line is often an annoying, but unavoidable aspect of everyday life: grabbing lunch, picking up a prescription, cashing a check, just to name a few. Now instead of just telling you how much time it will take to drive from one place to the other, Google has used its skills (all that data it collects) to create a new feature that gives a little more insight on just how busy the coffee shop is at 8 a.m. (busy).

The new mobile search feature, unveiled in a Google+ post today, aims to help consumers save time by showing them the busiest times of day at millions of businesses around the world.

To utilize the feature – which doesn’t really have a name – people just enter the business they’re looking for in Google’s search box. The generated results will now not only include the store’s phone number, address, and hours, but also a scrollable bar graph that shows the fluctuations of foot-traffic for all days of the week at the location.

The example provided by Google in its announcement shows the changing traffic at a local coffee shop. The resulting graph depicts the busiest hours of day at the location, but doesn’t explicitly tell you how long you should expect to wait.

While it’s likely that this new feature will be helpful when trying to determine when might be the best time to sneak out of the office for lunch or head to the post office, the results aren’t foolproof.

Don’t count on using the information to see when that amazing hole-in-the-wall store is busy, as a spokesperson for Google tells TechCrunch that results generally only appear for places where users are “commonly curious about how busy it typically gets.”

[via TechCrunch]

by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist