Google Brings Its Hotel And Restaurant Search To Android

Google is adding a deeper integration of its hotel and restaurant search to Google Search on Android. This is a pretty straightforward integration that allows you to type or speak queries like 'show me hotels in San Francisco,' and the search results page will indeed return a list of hotels.

Since its acquisition of ITA Travel, Google has been slowly adding travel-related products to its arsenal. There is no faster flight search engine on the market than Google Flights, for example, and its hotel search, which aggregates data from numerous sites, is also fast and highly competitive. Oddly enough, though, few people know about these features and indeed, Google doesn't really advertise them heavily.

It's worth noting that Google has already integrated flight search into its voice search.

The same kind of queries also now work for restaurants. Just ask Google to 'show some restaurants in Portland' and it will do so.

Overall, the restaurant search seems pretty flexible. You can ask it for specific cuisines, for example, and you can ask for cheap or expensive restaurants, too. By default, the search seems to prioritize well-rated restaurants. That's a good thing, because I haven't been able to find a query that lets you filter by ratings, though you can always drill down a bit deeper in the search interface itself.

According to Google, all of this is meant to make last-minute reservations easier. As we've pointed out before, though, the company is putting a lot of emphasis on all things voice search lately and sees it as one of the main ways we will interact with its services in the future. As such, it makes sense for Google to continue to bring more of its products into the fold and let users interact with them this way.