Google Now Shows How Busy Businesses Are

When a player as big as Google is angling toward being the official search engine of commerce, it can be the little things that make all the difference.

It is that spirit, it seems, that inspired Google to add its latest and greatest enhancement to its shopping suite, a small tweak to its search protocol that allows users (and a business’s potential customers) to look up a local business to see how busy they are at any moment in time.   

“Do you ever find yourself trying to avoid long lines or wondering when is the best time to go grocery shopping, pick up coffee or hit the gym (hint: avoid Monday after work)? You’re in luck!” Google posted to its blog yesterday, (July 28). 

“In luck” translates to the new feature in limited run that allows users to see a retailer’s peak business times of day (with each day of the week broken out separately) in the same space where consumers currently see the name, address, hours and contact information. By zeroing in on a particular day of the week, users view a neat bar graph that displays the business’s activity by the hour. This allows potential customers to avoid lines and crowds by arranging their visits at lower traffic times.  

The feature only works for select businesses for now, although Google says the numbers of those businesses is in the millions around the world, and that they are planning to expand the feature. Initially, the feature was available only through the Google Now app, though it now is a standard part of the standard search feature. 

As an example, Google encouraged searching for “Blue Bottle Williamsburg” and seeing the feature for yourself.

More than just an application that helps consumers plan to allocate time better, the app also allows consumers to make comparisons between businesses. Although the exact numbers are not shown in the graphs, a consumer interested in stacking businesses up against each other could do separate search and compare the heights of the bars.

And while the applications for consumers might be numerous, the potential monetary channels the new service could open up for Google are potentially very impressive.  

For example, Google can leverage its local advertising platform to help merchant partners push incentives and offer to try to fill out the dreaded down times more robustly — or use that information to help a competitor merchant push their shorter waiting times for a user who has had a search reveal they will be standing in line for a while at their first choice, or to order ahead, using, what else, Android Pay!

In short, by arming consumers with more tools for their decision calculations and businesses more direct access to when they need marketing, Google is positioning itself as the useful, knowledgeable man–in–the–middle helping making commerce happen – via a use case that consumers still use mobile search for: finding a place to eat and/or drink. 

As everyone knows, Google is the world’s most popular search engine, and though Bing has made some impressive strides lately, it is unlikely it is going to see that particular crown knocked off anytime soon. But Google’s challenge is a world that is going increasingly mobile, and using mobile devices as their central commerce enablement tool. Google’s future has to develop past being just an engine for search and regeared for a future as an engine of commerce.

It’s made some big moves to that end lately. Google recently began encouraging more Beacon-friendly apps, acquired Homejoy to break into the home services market, proved that “Mobilegeddon” is a real thing that affects websites, and launched its own Buy Button.