Google offers Public DNS service

[David Baxter PhD]

Webmasters Wary of Google Public DNS
December 4, 2009

Google announced the launch of the Google Public DNS service, which is a free public domain name system. It is a lot like OpenDNS, but without any of the administrative controls for blocking sites or redirecting mismatched domains to a special landing page (which is where OpenDNS makes their money).

Google's DNS IPs are pretty sweet, they are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. If you want to use it, here are the configuration instructions.

Google said they are doing this for one reason and one reason alone: to make the web faster. Google knows which sites are the most popular out there and they will precache those pages so it doesn't have to be done at the time of the DNS request. Most DNS servers cache sites based on the last time a user of theirs accessed it, Google will anticipate that without usage - at this point. Google likes speed, as we discussed time and time again over here.

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Initial response by webmasters seems to be skeptical and I think for good reason. This puts even more information with potential privacy violations into the not always secure hands of Google.

Who will really benefit from this: Google? The webmaster? The average surfer?