Google becoming more food-centric can provide practical assistance to many users. A new article from TechCrunch said Google will have a new feature to help food lovers choose a menu as it will try to showcase restaurant menus in the actual result pages.

How It Works

When an Internet user searches for his favorite restaurant in Google search box, the restaurant's menu will pop up above the results page. It saves the user much time as he does not need to search for the menu by exploring the restaurant's actual Web site. This interface is great-looking, with an easy-to-read text and a system which makes it possible to switch from a menu segment to another such as soup's list to dessert's menu.

How To Use

This feature will automatically trigger once the user input the search text into Google search box. But for now, this works only if you type in Google Chrome "show me the menu for [restaurant]" as "menu [restaurant]" seems not to be working now.

You can also speak by clicking on Google's microphone icon, then say "show me the menu for restaurant [restaurant]".

Potential Issues and Advantages

It is yet unclear where Google will retrieve the menu data, whether it will consider restaurants that change their menus often, or why some menus will not appear. But it seems like most restaurants are not covered by the feature. TechCrunch theorizes that Google needs to partner with AllMenus.com, the menu aggregator Web site, so that both sites will coincide in showing or not showing restaurant menus.

To start with, Google has to support many restaurants, otherwise the feature will not have a good impact. It will not make sense if a menu pops up for a certain restaurant, but will not for another. Then, some users will not even know if this feature exists.

Search Engine Land spotted this feature a few weeks earlier and suspected the information come from AllMenus.com. Google at that time said it was just among its tests. But this is now made official in the Google+ page.

With most restaurant sites often not updated and some having slow and annoying Flash intros, this feature which will give what exactly you need is cool. This will have a big potential that can be used by many in a regular basis.