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Speed-up your surfing with Google's Public DNS
Don your tin foil hats, ladies and gentlemen. Take the following news with a pinch of salt and admire their noble privacy policy. Now brace yourself: Google, with the benevolent and seemingly-altruistic intent of speeding up the Internet, have just launched a public DNS service. What is DNS? Computers on the Internet don't actually have names -- they have numerical IP addresses. DNS maps names to numbers. When you type in 'DownloadSquad.com', DNS runs off and resolves that to an IP address. DNS is almost completely visible to you, the end user. Except for one thing: it's slow. Most Internet users will use their ISP's DNS servers which can be slow or buggy or even return the wrong results. With Google's new public DNS servers, they are guaranteeing faster speeds and more accurate results. Apparently DNS servers can also be compromised and fake details inserted -- with Google's service you should be more secure.
But there are implications. Good implications, but still, you wouldn't seriously expect Google to launch something as huge as this with purely innocent intentions... would you? Google wants to speed up your access to their services. Their Voice, YouTube and Docs services -- all of these could gain substantially from faster DNS resolution speeds. Then there's their free Wi-Fi they've been offering -- of course they want to guarantee a high-quality experience for their users, so they need to provide a fast end-to-end pipe for their web apps and searches. DNS is a big stepping-stone in that direction. Next up is actually rolling out their own Internet backbone... (one day soon, I assure you).
I'm just amazed that they're promising to keep the wealth of data they will accrue purely within the Google Public DNS project. Imagine if we all used their DNS service -- they'd know, without cookies, without Analytics, exactly what you're doing at any given moment. Food for thought...
Incidentally, if you want to use the new service, simply change your network settings to use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers. For more details, check out the Google Code page for their Public DNS project.
[via Official Google Blog]
Comments
34
Subscribe to commentsKenn.keeperDec 3rd 2009 3:48PM
Public Notice: If you read an article more than once you are apt to fully understand what is being said, therefore you won't have to keep posting the mistakes you made or have to edit a post......It is nice that mistakes are found but make sure the information is correct the first time, I see this happening in too many posts.....
Free is Good
Kenn
Sebastian AnthonyDec 3rd 2009 3:50PM
Man, I had no idea people looked so closely at the screenshots.
I have fixed it just for YOU!
Kenn.keeperDec 3rd 2009 4:09PM
Sebastian:
My post was meant for the general public, not as a personal opinion of your work......Too many comments reflect the fact that the READER isn't reading the posts properly.....
Your work is always interesting.......
Free is Good
Kenn...
Sebastian AnthonyDec 3rd 2009 4:21PM
Oh, OK! Thanks -- and thanks for the little 'tip'!
zombiesDec 3rd 2009 3:48PM
google should show a google search when the domain doesn't exist, like openDNS, I don't like that openDNS uses yahoo search.
techpopsDec 3rd 2009 9:04PM
I'm seeing a lot said about Googles new DNS but considering its aim is to speed up browsing, no ones talking about what the speed up really is.
It'll be a bit faster for new sites is all but useless information really. I wish sites reporting on software would take a similar approach to sites like Toms Hardware and dig a little deeper than a comment and extraction from some original post on Googles own blog.
I'm sure many people would be interested in what the differences were between this and OpenDNS. It would make for a catchy article too OpenDNS vs GoogleDNS. Features and performance compared.
Or maybe no ones really interested and I'm just a hopeless nerd :)
Sebastian AnthonyDec 3rd 2009 9:13PM
Damn, did you look at our pending article queue...?!
No, just kidding -- but yeah, we have some other stuff for Google DNS in mind!
techpopsDec 3rd 2009 9:41PM
Sweet, looking forward to it.
I see Google has its own benchmark tool its released too which I couldn't get working on Windows7 for reasons its not worth going into as my setup is weird but im sure itll work fine for most people who dont eat their outgoing alive before its had chance to fly.
Sanjay GoelDec 4th 2009 1:57AM
This article is incomplete without the mention of OpenDNS. I am surprised you didn't mention them in the main article.
Sebastian AnthonyDec 4th 2009 7:32AM
Hm, I don't think the services really overlap. Not yet at least!
techpopsDec 4th 2009 5:48AM
Here's a pretty interesting benchmarking session comparing Google to OpenDNS
http://www.manu-j.com/blog/opendns-alternative-google-dns-rocks/403/
I wondered what effect location would have and it seems to make a big difference. Still, averaging everything out you could still work out whos faster?
The differences don't seem like much but I was reading elsewhere that half a second is enough to disturb a users experience of a site enough that it would lose money, as reported by Amazon.
Sebastian AnthonyDec 4th 2009 7:32AM
Ooh, nice data. Thanks!
jfjbDec 4th 2009 5:01PM
duh!
jfjbDec 4th 2009 5:07PM
I meant to say -- and cover my tracks since my actual response to this very article got lost in limbo -- that I wonder when the first DNS owner will actually use cloud technology to protect its (hers ?) users ... like Panda is doing with her (its ?) cloud anti-virus.
Pass the word or learn about it.
Surf's up, dudes and dudettes!