Public DNS from Google

A key infrastructure of internet DNS (Domain name System) resolution service is available with must less resolution time from Google. Though traditionally it has been the infrastructure of Internet Service Provider (One who gives internet to you), It makes lot of sense to use resolution service from search engine giant like Google. A report says 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, We the internet users prefer faster or nothing. Google crawls lakhs and lakhs of websites every day, they invested huge money and infrastructure man power to maintain large lookup system. Google Public DNS is a recursive DNS resolver, similar to other publicly available services. Now they leverage this to internet users as free service as part of their Speer project, which works on improving internet speed.

Google Public DNS Helps in 3 important aspects of DNS,

SPEED: Resolver-side cache misses,Clever caching techniques, prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires. Google does this asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back.

It will work well for users with short reach like US, Europe, i doubt about asia. A simple latency to DNS server will touch an average 250 ms. Which will have significant impact on Resolution. Unless they do it as anycast system with multiple distributed servers, bounded to region,with different IP, 2 DNS as listed in the code.google.com will not help.

Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.

Validity: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user’s browsing experience.

Google Public DNS IP addresses

The Google Public DNS IP addresses are as follows:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

Google has been doing many works to implement internet speed. Public DNS service is one of them. Coming out of your ISP for DNS makes lot of sense, because most of them are not so keen to maintain them properly. It will also affect ISP revenue, Many of them have been making money by redirecting non-existing domain to advertisement websites with Google DNS they no longer have any control. It would be nice if Google comes out with region specific DNS solution model.

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Tags: DNS, google DNS, latency, latency google DNS, public DNS

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 9:05 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.