Google Public DNS

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Introducing Google Public DNS
12/03/2009 08:35:00 AM
When you type www.wikipedia.org into your browser’s address bar, you expect nothing less than to be taken to Wikipedia. Chances are you’re not giving much thought to the work being done in the background by the Domain Name System, or DNS.

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we’re launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.

Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another.

The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable. You can read about the specific technical improvements we’ve made in our product documentation and get installation instructions from our product website.

If you’re web-savvy and comfortable with changing your network settings, check out the Google Code Blog for detailed instructions and more information on how to set up Google Public DNS on your computer or router.

As people begin to use Google Public DNS, we plan to share what we learn with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally. The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone.

Thoughts? I changed my DNS to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4 and noticed a slight difference.

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hm. interesting

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experimenting with my laptop right now only, seems to have sped things up quite a bit.

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Agreed. Everything just seems to be POP done.

On Win.7, Desktop.

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probably just one more thing for them to cache in their databases and sell off to companies or hand over to the government.

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threw it on xbox also will see if it does anything.

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Yeah big brother is getting bigger, we have no privacy anymore. But there is little that we can do about it.

George Carlin:

”Power does what it wants, and now they’re just more naked about it. Now they just put it right out front and say, ‘This is what we’re doing to you folks’. It’s, you know, this country is finished. It’s been sliding downhill a long time.“
“And everybody’s got a cell phone that makes pancakes, so they don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to make any trouble. The people have been bought off by gizmos and toys in this country, and no one questions things anymore.”

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I miss him so much. :frowning:

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Pretty much, if you’re using Google for DNS they will now know every site you try to get to, not just through the Google portal.

-TJ

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They claim the databases are cleared after 24-48hrs. and is only used for diagnosing problems. whats the dif if they know vs your isp.

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i wonder how this compares to open DNS… anyone?

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kind of scary that one company could potentially control propagation of dns. I see pro’s and con’s to this. It is something that lazy ISP’s have been f’ng up for a long time.

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Yeah… though I don’t worry at all about Google in terms of up-time/reliability or them fucking with dns. But it is a bit scary that they “could” if everybody transitions to them. You’re totally right though; ISP’s have been fucking it up for sometime, so a little competition in the market should drive them to do better.

I guess nothing, other than ISP’s tend to be too stupid/lazy/whatever to really do anything with that data, I wouldn’t count on Google being that way.

-TJ

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http://radoff.com/blog/2009/12/07/google-dns-benchmarking-and-rationale/

http://radoff.com/images/dns.png