Here’s a giant leap forward. Google, the titan of search engines, is now showing menus for restaurants. 

Google announced on Friday on Google+ (which would explain why you didn’t see it) that it has added full menus to the search results pages. Some techies say they’ve been noticing these results for a few weeks, but didn’t come forward with the announcement until Google made it official.

Not all restaurant menus are available, and it’s unclear, even to the webmaster professionals, how the menus are being culled (one blogger suggested they come from a site called SinglePlatform, which is where TripAdvisor pulls its menu data).

You have to ask Google to give you the menu, and yes, you can do that verbally by clicking the microphone icon and speaking to it: “Show me the menu for Citrus Restaurant in Orlando.” I was able to get the search result shown above by just typing “menu Citrus Restaurant.”

It looks like there are still some bugs to work out, but I see this as a significant advancement in informing members of the dining public. What do you think?

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