Google continues to root itself in the restaurant industry. Recently, the search company unveiled ‘From the Menu’ which allows guests to post pics of your food and venue right to their search engine, as well as let users review your restaurant.

Now Google has expanded their mobile-optimized “rich cards” program to include local restaurants (we’re sure Yelp is just thrilled).

The evolution of Google's 'rich' search engine.

Rich cards display search results in a much more visual way. Instead of just text and hyperlinks like a standard search, or small thumbs and text like in a “rich snippet” display, rich cards are displayed in a horizontal and navigable carousel in mobile.

Google 'rich cards' allow for a superior search experience for restaurant guests.

The rich cards results carousel appears a few items down in mobile search. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best, etc. Searchers can also swipe while in the “more info mode” (see animated GIF). It brings a whole new level of intractability and user friendliness to mobile search.

The rich cards also allow for “actions” such as food ordering and seat reservations.

The catch, of course, is that you need to build the rich card yourself. And it takes a little bit of coding knowledge – like AMP HTML (accelerated mobile pages).

The good news for those who aren’t coding wizzes, there are some plug-ins built for WordPress and Drupal websites that should help with the AMP process.

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