Google aims to make your restaurant search easier with these improvements

Google talked about a host of Search features and improvements at its Search On event yesterday. Some of these improvements aim to make searching for restaurants serving particular dishes a whole lot easier, while others let you point your camera at a food item and find a restaurant nearby that has it on its menu. Here’s a quick look at all the Search features that will make your restaurant search easier.

Look up specific food dishes

In the coming months, you’ll be able to look up a specific food dish in Google Search and find local places that offer it. Currently, searching for something like “soup dumplings” brings up a list of related restaurants. But, with the new experience, Search will show exact results for the dish you look up.

It will also let you narrow down results using a variety of filters. As shown in the attached GIF, users will have access to various filters, like Vegetarian, Vegan, Spicy, etc., in the new Dishes tab to find dishes that match those particular criteria.

Multisearch Near Me will help you identify and find dishes near you

In addition to the new Search experience, the upcoming ‘Near me’ feature for Multisearch will let users identify a food item in images and find restaurants nearby that offer it. This capability will roll out to users in English in the U.S. this fall.

Once it’s available, users will be able to use Google Lens to identify food items in images. After Lens identifies the food item, users can add the “near me” keyword to the search bar to find restaurants nearby that have it on their menu.

Improved restaurant recommendations

Google currently shows star ratings for restaurants when you look them up in Search. While the ratings are helpful to an extent, they don’t tell you what makes the restaurant special. Google aims to change that with the power of machine learning.

The company is planning to introduce a new experience in the coming months, which will analyze images and reviews from people to identify distinctive features. These features will appear at the top of the restaurant result to help you make a more informed decision.

Updated digital menus

Google is also working on improving digital menus for restaurants in Search. The company is working on making menus in search more visually rich and reliable by combining menu details from other users and merchants, along with information from restaurant websites that “use open standards for data sharing.”

Google explains that it’s using state-of-the-art image and language understanding technologies, like its Multitask Unified Model, to make this happen. The resulting digital menus in Search will show users the most popular dishes at a restaurant and highlight different dietary options, starting with vegetarian and vegan.

The aforementioned restaurant search enhancements will roll out to users in the coming months, and we can’t wait to try them out.

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