Google Public DNS

Google has launched another new service called Google Public DNS to make your internet surfing experience better.

What is DNS and why does it matter?

The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.

Why use Google Public DNS?

As web pages become more complex and include more resources from multiple origin domains, clients need to perform multiple DNS lookups to render a single page. The average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, slowing down his or her browsing experience. As the web continues to grow, greater load is placed on existing DNS infrastructure.

Google Public DNS is a recursive DNS resolver, similar to other publicly available services. It provides many benefits, including improved security, fast performance, and more valid results.

Google Public DNS implements a number of security, performance, and compliance improvements. We provide a brief overview of those enhancements below. If you’re a developer or deployer of DNS software, we hope you’ll also read the technical information pages on this site for more information on these features. Ultimately, our hope is to share our insights and inspire the community to adopt some of these features in all DNS resolvers.

By using Google Public DNS you can:

  • Speed up your browsing experience.
  • Improve your security.
  • Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.

How to use Google Public DNS?

A Google Code page shows how to change the DNS servers to use Google Public DNS servers. For more instructions visit the page here.

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Privacy?

According to the privacy information posted on the project web page, Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent.

Temporary Logs:

The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you’re using. We have to do this so that we can spot potentially bad things like DDoS attacks and so we can fix problems, such as particular domains not showing up for specific users. We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours.

Permanent Logs:

In the permanent logs, we don’t keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don’t correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.

What do you think about Google Public DNS? Are you using it? Well, for me, I think it is definitely not bad to have an option open especially when censorship is increasing everyday around the world.

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