Google’s latest feature will tell you how busy a place is in real-time before you set off.



The new extension to the Popular Times feature added to Google Maps and search in July 2015 has been upgraded with a live feed of how busy a place is for certain venues.

With a new “Live” tag, Maps now displays a red overlay on top of the historic busy period data showing whether it really is busy or quiet as usual at the moment.

The feature uses anonymised location data from other Google users, as well as searches, to analyse how busy it is at that moment. While predicted busy times from historic data is generally useful, at sales times or when transport conditions are less than ideal, the flow of people might increase at normally quiet times.

Google live popular times data. Photograph: Google

The feature is being rolled out ahead of the busy Black Friday shopping period, but could equally be useful for checking out whether a particular bar or cinema is packed among other venues with variable busy times.

Google Maps, like others such as CityMapper, already displays live traffic and public transport congestion information pulled from both public data and other Google Maps and Waze users. The introduction of live data is one of the big differentiators for mapping apps along with indoor navigation and libraries of store and points of interests data.

Google has also expanded the extra information Maps displays, including data on how long people generally stay in the venue or location, as well as opening hours for concessions and departments within a larger store or business, which are set by the individual businesses.