Google Launches Public DNS to Speed Up Web

doctorie · Dec 3, 2009

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356618,00.asp

by Mark Hachman
In an unusual move, Google announced Google Public DNS on Thursday, a new means by which users can utilize the Google DNS servers to access the Internet.

Google has even added telephone support for those who choose to make the switch.

For many, the DNS settings that lie at the heart of a user's router rarely need to be touched. When a user types in "www.pcmag.com", for example, the user's PC contacts the DNS server via the router and asks for the numerical IP address of the site, somewhat like 1-800-FLOWERS actually connects to a numerical telephone number.

Google's motivation, according to the company, is to both speed up Web browsing as well as provide enhanced security. "We believe that a faster DNS infrastructure could significantly improve the browsing experience for all web users," Prem Ramaswami, of Google's Public DNS Team, wrote in a blog post. "To enhance DNS speed but to also improve security and validity of results, Google Public DNS is trying a few different approaches that we are sharing with the broader web community."

Users who want to try out the new Google DNS servers can change their DNS settings to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4, as its instructions describe. Google strongly recommends, however, that users copy down their existing settings. Interestingly, Google also provides telephone support for its Public DNS as well.

The new DNS settings are not for ISPs to use, as Google does not have a service-level agreement (SLA) in place. The project is characterized as "experimental".

The new DNS settings can be used by any user worldwide, although performance increases will be fastest for users who are in close proximity to a Google data center. Those data centers are located worldwide, although Google hasn't specified exactly where they are physically located.

Although DNS servers are maintained by a user's ISP, the OpenDNS project has maintained a similar open resolver project for a number of years. Ramaswami said in an interview that the Google will encourage other open resolvers to engage it in dialogue and to adopt some of the techniques Google's Pubic DNS used to better improve the Web.

Ramaswami emphatically denied that the company would in any way monetize the data it collected, referring to its privacy policies. "This is abotu making the Web faster, not about the data," he said. "We've gone out of the way to make this true."

From a speed perspective, the Google DNS servers use prefetching, Google said, refreshing the record on a particular network request continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains before the record expires. 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, the company claimed.

Google Public DNS was also put into place to prevent the sort of DNS poisoning attacks that were disclosed last year. The system can also prevent so-called DNS "amplification attacks" that attack the DNS server itself, and then use them to route other PCs to attack target sites in an orchestrated distributed denial-of-service attack.

But will users want to trust Google with their each and every request to the Internet? In an attempt to defuse concerns, Google also added a privacy page describing how it handles its records.

Google said that it does keep a user's unique IP address, but only for a short time, to detect and prevent a denial-of-service attack. Afterward, Google begins "burning the logs," in Ramaswami's words.

"Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using," the company said. "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.

"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."

Google representatives referred questions about privacy to the privacy page, but said that the company would make executives available for comment later Thursday morning.
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The Cox · Dec 3, 2009

looks interesting.

Sirius · Dec 4, 2009

Curious. I guess at least I can use it as a backup in case my ISP's DNS goes down - though actually I don't think I've had that problem since leaving New Zealand.

Rubius · Dec 8, 2009

I use OpenDNS and it works great. Here's a guide for anyone who's interested.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/ne...ce_administrate_your_network_it_pro_using_dns

kviolet84 · Dec 8, 2009

Rubius said: ↑

I use OpenDNS and it works great. Here's a guide for anyone who's interested.http://www.maximumpc.com/article/ne...ce_administrate_your_network_it_pro_using_dns
Click to expand...

i also use this one ,and i think the link is very useful for others .

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