Google Search is already good at many things, besides helping you find what you’re looking for. Google has, over the past few years, made it easier to find things like prices of flights, vacation destinations, cures to different sicknesses and much more. Today, the company announced that they are making it easier to find nearby events. You’ll be able to type in simple queries like “concerts in Los Angeles” or whichever city you are located in, and it’ll tell you what concerts are happening. But on top of that, it’ll give you a quick way to get tickets to that concert and also show you what’s happening this week, next week and even next month.
It’s not yet fully rolled out, as Google only just started pushing the feature out to all of their users. Google says that they decided to bring this feature to search now because they are seeing millions of queries each day about different events that are nearby. So they are making it easier for users to find these events, without having to do multiple search queries. Really, it’s something that Google is now competing with Facebook for, and that’s the public event space. Facebook has over 100 million queries daily for different events, and Google’s numbers are likely much higher.
Google’s event section should make it easier to find things to do nearby, or if you are traveling, finding things to do at your destination. Seeing as you can add a city to your query, instead of Google just simply using your current location for your query. It’s bound to be a pretty popular feature, especially with the different filters available. Google hasn’t said how they are getting these event listings, but they are likely just scouring the web for websites that have event pages already listed, seeing as Google Search already shows these a bit differently than regular search results. As per usual, this feature will likely be a bit rough to begin with, but get better over time, as Google is able to work on it and make better and better with each search update. And, of course, this is a US only feature, no word on when it’ll roll out to other countries just yet.