When I read the announcement today that Google launched its own public DNS service, my reaction was mixed. My first thought was, “wow, what sector of the Internet aren’t they taking over?” But then again, the reason they take over things is that they do them so well. Google was the first really good search engine. They completely changed the face of web-based email. Their computer translation is quickly becoming the web standard. Their text to speech (Google Voice voicemail transcription and 1-800-GOOG411) is very good. Some of their services have no comparison.
DNS is like the Internet’s white pages. Routers, servers, and the like know about IP addresses, for example, 208.67.222.222. You could think of these as phone numbers. Humans, on the other hand, know about domain names, like facebook.com, youtube.com. DNS is the lookup service that gives the IP address for a domain name. This is a vital service to the world wide web, and happens without the user knowing about it, hundreds of times a day.
The idea that Google would make its own DNS server and claim speed improvements was fascinating. So I decided to test Google’s DNS service for myself. I usually use my ISP’s DNS server or OpenDNS, whichever is faster. I got a program to test DNS performance with 50 random domains. My ISP (Comcast): most lookups were in the 80-90 ms range, with spikes to make the average 100 ms. Open DNS: most were in the 100-110 ms range, with spikes to make the average 140 ms. Google DNS: most were in the 40-50 ms range, with spikes to make the average 80 ms. Note that these are the actual DNS entry lookup speeds, not pings.
So Google has managed to beat both my ISP and Open DNS from my current location. I’m very impressed. And Google once again has followed their “Don’t be evil” approach by not selling ads on the DNS lookup failure pages. Most ISPs give you so-called “search results” when you mistakenly type a domain name incorrectly. These search results are only a source of revenue for the ISP, and rarely relevant. Google is playing nice, and is simply responding with a standard error, which your browser will relate to you in its own way.
For the tin-foil hat crowd, I decided to read their privacy statement and it seems very reasonable. They only keep as many logs as they need to troubleshoot errors and respond to attacks, and they never match anything to your personal Google account. That means that DNS lookups won’t show in your personal search history or web history if you are using those features.
That was enough to convince me. I’ve switched. 8.8.8.8 for life!
