Foursquare announced today that it has added business hours to its apps for merchants who provide them. This includes specific times like happy hour, kitchen hours and free admission hours, if applicable.

Businesses who wish to add their hours, have a means to do so here.

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You see what they did there? You don’t think about an app like Foursquare as a search tool, but it’s little things like this that give people alternatives to Google and other traditional search engines for finding certain kinds of information. That’s why the search market should probably start being less judged by just the usual suspects.

Interestingly enough, last week, Foursquare announced it was dumping the Google Maps API in favor of MapBox, an open source platform.

In other Foursquare news, the company has teamed up with American Express on SXSW deals (again). They’re also hosting a city badges contest, which was just opened up to the whole world.