You might remember a time when ordering food via phone meant dialing a number and talking to an actual human being. Those days are over.
Using your phone to search for a restaurant on Google will now produce a "Place an order" link if the location also has a page on Seamless, Grubhub, Eat24, Delivery.com, BeyondMenu or MyPizza.com. That link prompts you to open a website for the corresponding service, from which you can place your order. A representative for Google told The Huffington Post that the company is working on similar functionality for desktop searches.
Google announced the new feature in a blog post Thursday.
It looks like this:
We tried it with a restaurant located near HuffPost's New York office and can confirm that it works:
It's definitely convenient, but you instead might want to consider tapping the "Call" icon that Google puts above the "order" link. It's old news that restaurants can pay hefty commissions to services like Seamless, and the problem only seems to be getting worse for some, with the online service sometimes taking as much as 20 percent per order from a restaurant.
This story has been updated to include information about a desktop version of this feature.