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Google Launches Public DNS Resolver

Posted by timothy on from the their-interest-is-understandable dept.

AdmiralXyz writes "Google has announced the launch of their free DNS resolution service, called Google Public DNS. According to their blog post, Google Public DNS uses continuous record prefetching to avoid cache misses — hopefully making the service faster — and implements a variety of techniques to block spoofing attempts. They also say that (unlike an increasing number of ISPs), Google Public DNS behaves exactly according to the DNS standard, and will not redirect you to advertising in the event of a failed lookup. Very cool, but of course there are questions about Google's true motivations behind knowing every site you visit."

6 of 540 comments (clear)

  1. I guess it is good news... by ls671 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > They also say that (unlike an increasing number of ISPs), Google Public DNS behaves exactly according to the DNS standard.

    Congratulations, this would then be the first free service that I know of which doesn't do redirect ! ;-)

    I setup my own DNS but I guess it is a little overkill for the common every day user. Setting your own DNS means you have to go to the network (e.g. internet) less often because your locally hosted DNS caches the already visited sites for a TTL period of time. This is especially true if you have several computers and that they tend to visit the same sites.

    Let me add that if your ISP or firewall intercepts requests to port 53, you will still be stuck with it ;-(

    --
    Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    1. Re:I guess it is good news... by afidel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually L3 is turning off public access to those resolvers and has been for a while, sometimes you will not get any response at other times they just degrade response times.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  2. Don't get me wrong, I love Google. by olsmeister · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But it sure seems like they're getting more and more of my personal information lately. What I search for, where I surf to, with my Droid where I navigate to, my e-mails, my documents. WOW.

  3. Re:OpenDNS by yakatz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OpenDNS hijacks Google searches, which could be part of Google's motivation also.

  4. Re:Questions? by vitaflo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "My guess is, they want broad statistics like the most popular domains visited, maybe even traffic patterns of which domains people tend to go to after which other domains."

    I'd go further. Given the announcement of Chrome OS, I wouldn't doubt they want to test a huge number of DNS requests and tweak the system to be as fast as possible to speed up Chrome. Google knows latency is an issue with web apps, and is trying to do all they can to reduce this. I think this is just another step in that direction.

  5. Re:Why not do both? by Richy_T · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Definitely this. My ISP changed their upstream provider and *their* network was intercepting requests on port 53. Luckily, I also administer DNS on another network so set up a bypass on port 54. Personally, I think providing false DNS information should count as fraud.