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Maybe a stupid question, but is it monetized somehow? I mean DNS servers. After all, it's a pretty heavy load… I still don't really understand what is (is known

by krick 13y ago

Maybe a stupid question, but is it monetized somehow? I mean DNS servers. After all, it's a pretty heavy load… I still don't really understand what is (is known to be) monetizable and what isn't.

cmelbye 13y ago
Sure, they benefit by getting valuable data on Internet traffic. For another example of DNS server monetization, see http://opendns.com/ http://opendns.com/. Turns out there are clever ways of (mis)using DNS features to make money. For example, your server could hijack NXDOMAIN responses and instead direct the user to a nice page that tells them that the name couldn't be resolved alongside a couple relevant advertisements.
- wdr1 13y ago
  NXDOMAIN hijacking is what OpenDNS does.
gizmo686 13y ago
What could Google possibly do with people telling them every website they are visiting? Also, at the scale Google operates, I am not sure that DNS is that big of a resource commitment, and it may allow them to do fancy traffic routing stuff for their own services.
- shard972 13y ago
  They could use it to build more accurate profiles of their users in order to monetize them.
  - remosi 13y ago
    > We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services. -- https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy
    - krick 13y ago
      Interesting. I tend to believe it for some reason, although I don't know why myself. Does somebody really check if such promises are true? Are they trustworthy? It reminds me, that case with collecting wifi traffic — how did it get revealed at all?
      - remosi 13y ago
        Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect. In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products. -- http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/wifi-data-collectio...
        pearjuice 13y ago
        How do you _mistakenly_ collect "samples of payload data"? Someone mistakenly wrote/used a packet logger, compiled/installed it on the Street View cars and mistakenly executed the service to be running in the background? How does that happen?
        billiard 13y ago
        http://googleblog.blogspot.jp/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.jp/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-u... links to http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//googleblogs/pdfs/friedberg_sourcecode_analysis_060910.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/... which explains how it happened in the executive summary and then in way more detail in the body.
- krick 13y ago
  I have no idea, that's why I'm asking. And as you can see there turn out to be some pretty good answers to that already.
  - _zen 13y ago
    He was being sarcastic.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
phaer 13y ago
I guess, for Google at least, getting all DNS requests of their users is worth paying for a popular DNS server. That's how they know which sites your like even if those sites don't use Google Analytics.
- krick 13y ago
  Wow, that's really good idea. So obvious after you said it, but I absolutely didn't think of it!
- mcv 13y ago
  So if I want to bias their search in favour of my favourite sites, I should use their DNS?
yoelp 13y ago
>We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information. This may actually be true, as google believe's that if you arrive faster to a website after searching on Google you will use Google more
xiphias 13y ago
People use Google much more if they can access it fast, which means more revenue. A lot of ISPs have slow DNS servers, and Google needs a good production DNS server for internal purposes anyways, so it was not that hard for the engineers to make it a public project.

by krick 13y ago

Maybe a stupid question, but is it monetized somehow? I mean DNS servers. After all, it's a pretty heavy load… I still don't really understand what is (is known to be) monetizable and what isn't.

cmelbye 13y ago

Sure, they benefit by getting valuable data on Internet traffic. For another example of DNS server monetization, see http://opendns.com/ http://opendns.com/. Turns out there are clever ways of (mis)using DNS features to make money. For example, your server could hijack NXDOMAIN responses and instead direct the user to a nice page that tells them that the name couldn't be resolved alongside a couple relevant advertisements.

wdr1 13y ago
NXDOMAIN hijacking is what OpenDNS does.

gizmo686 13y ago

What could Google possibly do with people telling them every website they are visiting? Also, at the scale Google operates, I am not sure that DNS is that big of a resource commitment, and it may allow them to do fancy traffic routing stuff for their own services.

shard972 13y ago
They could use it to build more accurate profiles of their users in order to monetize them.
- remosi 13y ago
  > We don't correlate or combine information from our temporary or permanent logs with any personal information that you have provided Google for other services. -- https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy
  - krick 13y ago
    Interesting. I tend to believe it for some reason, although I don't know why myself. Does somebody really check if such promises are true? Are they trustworthy? It reminds me, that case with collecting wifi traffic — how did it get revealed at all?
    - remosi 13y ago
      Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect. In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products. -- http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/wifi-data-collectio...
      - pearjuice 13y ago
        How do you _mistakenly_ collect "samples of payload data"? Someone mistakenly wrote/used a packet logger, compiled/installed it on the Street View cars and mistakenly executed the service to be running in the background? How does that happen?
        billiard 13y ago
        http://googleblog.blogspot.jp/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.jp/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-u... links to http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//googleblogs/pdfs/friedberg_sourcecode_analysis_060910.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/... which explains how it happened in the executive summary and then in way more detail in the body.
krick 13y ago
I have no idea, that's why I'm asking. And as you can see there turn out to be some pretty good answers to that already.
- _zen 13y ago
  He was being sarcastic.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

phaer 13y ago

I guess, for Google at least, getting all DNS requests of their users is worth paying for a popular DNS server. That's how they know which sites your like even if those sites don't use Google Analytics.

krick 13y ago
Wow, that's really good idea. So obvious after you said it, but I absolutely didn't think of it!
mcv 13y ago
So if I want to bias their search in favour of my favourite sites, I should use their DNS?

yoelp 13y ago

>We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information. This may actually be true, as google believe's that if you arrive faster to a website after searching on Google you will use Google more

xiphias 13y ago

People use Google much more if they can access it fast, which means more revenue. A lot of ISPs have slow DNS servers, and Google needs a good production DNS server for internal purposes anyways, so it was not that hard for the engineers to make it a public project.