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Introducing Google Public DNS: A new DNS resolver from Google
- drp 17y agoThis was inevitable, and will give OpenDNS some major competition. Google could make tons of money from ads and sponsored results on error pages.
- jbeda 17y agoActually the whole point of this is to not redirect error pages. If you read the blog post, you'll see that they address this (and privacy concerns). DNS redirection is pretty evil and I'm proud of Google for working against it. (Disclaimer - I'm a Google employee, I didn't work on this and my opinions are my own.)
- drp 17y agoIs displaying a "that domain doesn't exist" page considered redirection? Otherwise what would you see in your browser? I wouldn't say OpenDNS is evil. Offering an ad-supported free service is how many things are allowed to continue existing.
- johns 17y agoThe browser's built-in handling of names that don't resolve
- IgorPartola 17y agoYour browser has a built in page for "domain does not exist". Google cannot place ads on it. On the other hand if you set up OpenDNS and then go to "doesnotexit123411452345.com", it will likely redirect you to something like "ads.opendns.com/?search=doesnotexist", which breaks DNS, life and the Universe. OpenDNS provides an option to turn off this type of redirection, but if you have a residential connection with a dynamic IP, all of a sudden that setting might just disappear. Avoid OpenDNS and IPS's that do this.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoOne of my corporate clients had their ISP move to OpenDNS for DNS services. It caused an endless stream of headaches for me as all of the various scientists employed there started complaining about the OpenDNS result pages (which also broke some other user habits they had -- they were used to being able to type "wikipedia" into Firefox's address bar and be redirected directly to wikipedia, for example). I couldn't get the ISP to budge and the client didn't want to change ISPs, so I ended up setting everybody up on some public SBC DNS servers I know about. With all respect due to davidu, this "functionality" in OpenDNS has caused me to feel a raging hatred for it every time its name is mentioned.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- aarongough 17y agoRogers does the same thing with 404 pages here in Canada. Another worrying thing I noticed the other day is that they have a "feature" which injects an HTML header into the page you're requesting if you are approaching your bandwidth limit. We all know that our ISPs are inspecting our packets, but it's a little disconcerting to see the pages you request manipulated in such a wholesale fashion.
- ams6110 17y agoOpenDNS is an easy way to keep the kids out of most of the uglier sites on the internet. That's why I use it.
- davidu 17y agoWhat do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do? Ironic coming from the largest advertising and redirection company in the world. :-) Still, users having choice and forcing businesses to compete to win is good for end users and I support that 100%.
- rpdillon 17y ago"What do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do?" Not DNS redirection.
- pyre 17y ago> What do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do? DNS redirection affects ALL programs that are trying to access a network address (obviously unless directly by IP). So when my Jabber/XMPP client tries to contact doesnotexist.example.com, being redirected to an advertisement page doesn't help me very much, does it? Google Toolbar and Google Chrome defaulting to Google as a 'landing page' of sorts only affects your web experience and only when using those pieces of software. This is a far cry from Comcast's DNS servers resolving ALL DNS traffic that should return 'does not exist' to their advert-filled web servers.
- nailer 17y agoThere are no error pages when a domain isn't found. If a DNS server presents an IP so you can show people a web page ( like Verisign did intentionally a few years ago [1]) instead of returning 'no such domain' (NXDOMAIN), you break DNS for all apps that expect a host that's not registered to not resolve. Verisign's screwup lasted 20 days. I doubt Google would do this. [1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dryicerx 17y agoI wonder what advantages they have over OpenDNS
- carbocation 17y agoFor one, they correctly return the expected DNS error when you make a request that cannot be resolved.
- dryicerx 17y agoYou can turn that off
- davidu 17y agoI'll do a blog post about this later today for those interested in my perspective on them entering the DNS space. :-) Edit: Here it is: http://blog.opendns.com/2009/12/03/opendns-google-dns/ http://blog.opendns.com/2009/12/03/opendns-google-dns/
- auston 17y agoplease do!
- noelchurchill 17y agoI was wondering what you'd think :)
- stuff4ben 17y agoHa! I was wondering in my head what OpenDNS would say about this when I read the article. Had no idea you were the founder of the company. That's pretty cool that you're on here.
- mahmud 17y agoNo need David, we're keeping the faith in this shop. ns[1-4].everydns.net, the first thing I do to a domain name that comes under my control.
- colbyolson 17y agoWho owns/is EveryDNS? They have a node in SanJose,CA (where I live) and I've never heard of them.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoI'm not entirely sure, but I used to go to high school with a kid (a different Dave) that was absolutely brilliant and did some work with them. When I was looking for a dns provider, he showed me their site and I've referred them to everyone I know since. They really run an excellent service at top-notch quality. Probably time for me to donate again..
- 17y ago
- txxxxd 17y agoQuick setup: the DNS servers are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
- jbeda 17y ago8 is a lucky number. 7.7.7.7 is owned by the US DoD. I love the idea of vanity IP addresses.
- electromagnetic 17y agoIt's kind of disappointing Google didn't get 1.3.3.7 though.
- Xichekolas 17y agoSadly the 1 block is unallocated, so they would have to make a special request to the IANA to get that address. Then again, they are Google, so who knows what they could get if they asked... I'm also curious who Halliburton merged with in order to get the entire 34 block. Surely they weren't around at the time those were handed out so foolishly.
- BerislavLopac 17y agoNow imagine what could be done with IPv6 vanity addresses... ;)
- jvdh 17y agoMakes me wonder how Google got that subnet though. They really weren't around when those A-nets were being handed out.
- jganetsk 17y agoLooks like Level3 owns the 8...* block, and Google must be renting 8.8.8.* and 8.8.4.*. The DNS service is probably hosted by Level 3.
- 17y ago
- pchristensen 17y agotwo reactions: Wow! Nervous :(
- prakash 17y agoSomething to remember be it Google Public DNS or things like Open DNS: Most CDN's use DNS to map you to one of their servers. E.g.: Assuming your physical location is in Asia/Europe, and let's say you use Open DNS, IP anycast will map you to their London DNS servers (Last I checked that's the only location outside of N. America OPEN DNS has servers). Let's say the website you visit is delivered by a CDN, this CDN's servers in London will deliver content to you even though there might be CDN servers in your ISP.
- antirez 17y ago8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4? Even solely for the fact they are so easy to remember I bet this are going to be the most used DNS resolvers in the world in a few months.
- joshuarodd 17y ago4.2.2.2 (and 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.3) have worked for many years.
- e1ven 17y agoI've commonly used 4.2.2.2, for exactly this reason. It's an easy IP to ping, and to resolve DNS from.
- antirez 17y agoI used to ping this IP but didn't know it was a DNS resolver, interesting.
- petercooper 17y agoI bet this are going to be the most used DNS resolvers in the world in a few months. I doubt it. I suspect a good 90% (or even more) of regular users just use the DNS servers provided to them by their ISPs when their connections come up.
- gloob 17y agoI would be astounded if 10% of users had ever heard of DNS, much less knew what it was and how to change which one they were using.
- drtse4 17y agoAnother source of interesting data about internet usage for google. You can find their privacy policy here: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html Quote from "What we log": "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." Even if without any reference to the user that actually visited those sites, mantaining information about the "cluster" of urls visited during a browsing session could form a useful source of data not only to optimize ads and searches, the most obvious use could be build something like a recommendation engine (something that some kind of internet users could like, but i admit that something like this could be useless from the google point of view).
- chanux 17y agoA DNS I can actually remember. A Quick comparison with OpenDNS (shameless plug) http://chanux.tumblr.com/post/267873772/googledns-vs-opendns http://chanux.tumblr.com/post/267873772/googledns-vs-opendns
- swombat 17y agoFor what it's worth, I've been using Level3's DNS servers for a while now, due to the fact that they have insanely low latencies: 4.2.2.1... 4.2.2.6 (or thereabouts). Not sure what Google's going to have on those. Are they gonna be even more super-duper-fast? I mean, if you look at the line-up of the best DNS servers out there, they're pretty damn fast already: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19982548-DNS-Fastest-DNS-Server http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19982548-DNS-Fastest-DNS-Se... Also, for what it's worth, I've never quite understood why you'd use OpenDNS when level3 have open DNS servers that don't redirect you to their own pages when there's a missing record...
- TallGuyShort 17y ago>> Not sure what Google's going to have on those Trendiness, that's what
- lanstein 17y agoI believe those are Verizon DNS servers, actually.
- yangyang 17y ago~% whois 4.2.2.1 OrgName: Level 3 Communications, Inc. OrgID: LVLT Address: 1025 Eldorado Blvd. City: Broomfield StateProv: CO PostalCode: 80021 Country: US NetRange: 4.0.0.0 - 4.255.255.255 CIDR: 4.0.0.0/8 NetName: LVLT-ORG-4-8 NetHandle: NET-4-0-0-0-1 Parent: NetType: Direct Allocation NameServer: NS1.LEVEL3.NET NameServer: NS2.LEVEL3.NET Comment: RegDate: 1992-12-01 Updated: 2009-06-19
- psranga 17y agoGood move. I've been using 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.1 for a while now since I found out a few years ago that cable/DSL provider's DNS servers are flaky. It's amazing how often I go to somebody's house or cafe and find DNS to be the weak link.
- known 17y agoThey're not listed in http://www.dnsserverlist.org/indexbeta.php?oby=Q_RTT http://www.dnsserverlist.org/indexbeta.php?oby=Q_RTT
- gregparadee 17y agoThe information they gather from this could be the best thing ever for Google. They are now literally going to see how people go from site to site to site and direct ads and content to them based on that. Good move buisness wise Google.
- jeff18 17y agoComments like this are pretty common for every new product Google releases, but the fact remains that Google doesn't actually do this. http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html In other words, your comment is anti-Google FUD.
- drtse4 17y agoFrom your link : "we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage." Even if anonymous that data is really valuable as it allows to identify traffic patterns. I don't see anything "evil" in collecting anonymized data.
- dhimes 17y agoI wonder how hard is it to change their policy? Suppose some day the investors insist on monetizing this asset to its maximum potential. Can they just come up with a new privacy statement? In order to stop them from doing that their change would have to be a clear criminal violation of something. Nobody would be able to sue them, and even getting them in a clear criminal violation would be tough (in the US anyway; recall the debacle of v. Microsoft).
- wgj 17y agoThe Google product manager responded to TechCrunch saying "no blocking, hijacking, or filtering" and responded on privacy with "Collected data includes IP address (up to 48 hours, to detect malicious behavior against the service), ISP information and geographic information (2 weeks each). The data is not correlated with your Google account in any way." http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/03/google-dns-opendns/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/03/google-dns-opendns/
- youngian 17y agoIt's funny, I was thinking just yesterday about how much Comcast's new Domain Helper "service" makes me want to strangle them (http://blog.comcast.com/2009/08/domain-helper-national-rollout-begins.html http://blog.comcast.com/2009/08/domain-helper-national-rollo...).
- thaumaturgy 17y agoDistributed internet services is generally considered to be better than centralized ones. Google's entry into this, along with its other services, is beginning to give me pause. I'm glad they've worked on this, but I think I'll stick with DNS as it was intended to be.
- pyre 17y agoThe problem is that local ISPs (or national/regional like Comcast) are poisoning the well by resolving non-existent DNS entries to their own advertisement-laden web servers in an attempt to increase their bottom line. At least open DNS servers exist like Level3 (4.2.2.[1-4]) or now Google (8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4)... (and to a lesser extent OpenDNS, which is 'open' but tries to pull some of the same advertisement stuff). In general, the distributed aspect of DNS was to reduce latency and network traffic. While this might not keep network traffic within your ISP's internal network, it can severely reduce latency even if you're on a large ISP like Comcast/Qwest/TimeWarner. My only guess as to why this appears to be true, is that most ISPs don't really give a crap about their DNS servers just so long as it's still running and hasn't imploded.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoYou're right on all points. However, given Google's entry into this now, what motivation does any ISP have left for running its own DNS servers?
- pyre 17y agoKeeping traffic on it's own network vs having all DNS queries making a round-trip between their network and Google's DNS (ala Level3)? It's not like ISPs have ever needed an excuse to try and 'cut costs' by skimping on services. The difference is a greater majority of their customers use DNS than USENET.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoDNS doesn't occupy a lot of bandwidth. DNS servers on the other hand can be irksome to deal with if you don't have to. Small ISPs are merely resellers; if their DSL customers f'rinstance use Google's DNS servers instead of the ISPs, the ISP actually has less network traffic coming into their racks. Plus, they no longer have to admin a DNS server. For larger ISPs, it may still be less trouble to just let their customers use Google's DNS instead.
- dlsspy 17y agodhcp-107:~ 66% host -t ptr 8.8.8.8.in-addr.arpa 8.8.8.8.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer any-in-0808.1e100.net. dhcp-107:~ 67% host -t ptr 4.4.8.8.in-addr.arpa Host 4.4.8.8.in-addr.arpa not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
- boundlessdreamz 17y agoI tested this and it is consistently offering better results than OpenDNS and 4.2.2.2. The results are here http://www.manu-j.com/blog/opendns-alternative-google-dns-rocks/403/ http://www.manu-j.com/blog/opendns-alternative-google-dns-ro... The results posted are from India How are the results from inside US ?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- davidu 17y agoWhere are you located?
- andreyf 17y agoFrom a quick test (from NYC), and it seems not at all faster than OpenDNS. Still, a whole lot faster than my ISP's default DNS servers.
- htsh 17y agoin NJ, the ping is higher on google's servers than it is for OpenDNS (about 20ms vs 13ms) for me.
- dschobel 17y agoMore interesting than ping is the resolution speed. Try something like dig to get a better measure of real performance: http://www.madboa.com/geek/dig/ http://www.madboa.com/geek/dig/
- thetrumanshow 17y agoIf they can blacklist websites from their search engine, they can blacklist them from their DNS entries too. Doesn't this raise some concerns?
- dschobel 17y agofrom the post: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user's browsing experience.
- bm98 17y ago"Google Public DNS telephone support * 877-590-4367 in the U.S. * 770-200-1201 outside the U.S." Telephone support from Google? At first I thought this might be some kind of joke, but I then called and it's just automated help.
- durin42 17y agoMakes sense to have telephone support - I mean, if your DNS is hosed, then web-based support won't do you much good.
- tlrobinson 17y agoMake sure to write down the phone number while your DNS is working...
- datums 17y agoSo how does google benefit from me sending them my dns requests . . . , They can serve me "domain not found pages" w/ads (works for OpenDNS), unless I'm a server. If enough people/servers use it they can control how traffic is sent to specific domains (this would be evil). I don't necessary think my request will be a lot faster adding ms, per extra hop. What I don't like about ISPs is there disregard for TTLs. They set their own TTLs so they don't have to make a new request. With a large distributed cache it could mean less hops, I'd love to see a diagram of their dns infrastructure. I've used 4.2.2.1 - 4.2.2.4 (level3) in the past.
- datums 17y agoSo I thought about a bit. Google is not interested in redirection $$. They want to own the experience. As far as collecting your browsing behavior, they probably can easily do that with the toolbar. There operating systems can benefit from having geoDNS ip responses. Anyone know if this was a project worked on using the 20% do what you like google perk? If google decided to do something evil. ISP can easily redirect port 53 udp/tcp traffic to their own servers.
- known 17y agohttp://twitter.com/googlepublicdns http://twitter.com/googlepublicdns
- andreyf 17y agoThis is what a quick comparison looks like from NYC (in ms): Level 3 Google OpenDNS lifehacker.com 21 22 19 facebook.com 20 22 19 manu-j.com 21 44 42 reddit.com 30 73 20 tb4.fr 125 22 157 bbc.co.uk 103 22 98 The IP's used are 4.2.2.2, 8.8.8.8, and 208.67.222.222, respectively. Using the script provided here: http://www.manu-j.com/blog/opendns-alternative-google-dns-rocks/403/ http://www.manu-j.com/blog/opendns-alternative-google-dns-ro...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ashleyw 17y agoLevel 3 lifehacker.com 29ms Google lifehacker.com 20ms OpenDNS lifehacker.com 15ms Level 3 facebook.com 94ms Google facebook.com 20ms OpenDNS facebook.com 18ms Level 3 manu-j.com 32ms Google manu-j.com 46ms OpenDNS manu-j.com 14ms Level 3 reddit.com 30ms Google reddit.com 22ms OpenDNS reddit.com 16ms Level 3 tb4.fr 100ms Google tb4.fr 21ms OpenDNS tb4.fr 14ms Level 3 bbc.co.uk 132ms Google bbc.co.uk 21ms OpenDNS bbc.co.uk 15ms Nottinghamshire, UK. OpenDNS a clear winner…
- edu 17y agoMadrid, Spain. Level 3 lifehacker.com 355 msec Google lifehacker.com 37 msec OpenDNS lifehacker.com 30 msec Level 3 facebook.com 46 msec Google facebook.com 40 msec OpenDNS facebook.com 32 msec Level 3 manu-j.com 196 msec Google manu-j.com 37 msec OpenDNS manu-j.com 32 msec Level 3 reddit.com 44 msec Google reddit.com 60 msec OpenDNS reddit.com 29 msec Level 3 tb4.fr 89 msec Google tb4.fr 36 msec OpenDNS tb4.fr 31 msec Level 3 bbc.co.uk 47 msec Google bbc.co.uk 37 msec OpenDNS bbc.co.uk 30 msec OpenDNS wins
- srik 17y agowonder how much a vanity ip like that would cost
- est 17y agoPreviously: http://code.google.com/p/google-dnswall/ http://code.google.com/p/google-dnswall/
- tlrobinson 17y agoThis looks to be a pretty neat DNS benchmarking tool: http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ I think I'm behind a restricted proxy or something (on some hotel WiFi), because it's not really working for me, but I'd be interested to hear others' results. Compare to Level3's 4.2.2.2-3 and OpenDNS's 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (they really need a more memorable IP). Any other good ones?
- tlrobinson 17y agoMy results run from a SliceHost slice: https://gist.github.com/00a8976d0b76e796996a https://gist.github.com/00a8976d0b76e796996a Mean response (in milliseconds): -------------------------------- SBC/AT&T Global- ########### 45.11 OpenDNS-2 ############# 56.75 OpenDNS ################ 66.40 8.8.4.4 ################# 70.29 4.2.2.3 ###################### 96.20 UltraDNS-2 ######################## 104.35 UltraDNS ######################## 104.68 Level 3-2 ######################### 106.95 SYS-67.207.128.5 ########################### 114.93 SYS-67.207.128.4 ###################################################### 231.97
- moserware 17y agoSteve Gibson has a decent DNS Benchmark tool for Windows as well: http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm (Level 3's DNS servers were slightly faster than Google's for me) It has a list of several public DNS servers.
- acg 17y agoSome comments get clouded in politics and suspicion. If this move has a commercial reason then perhaps it's easily explained as to compete with OpenDNS. Complaining that a search engine collects information seems crazy: surely that is a sign of a good company. The important thing is choice/competition. Google is a good competitor, whether you like them or not.
- peterwwillis 17y agoAll I wanna know is: Can I tunnel IP traffic through it? http://thomer.com/howtos/nstx.html http://thomer.com/howtos/nstx.html
- jsz0 17y agoDoes anyone know who provides the bulk of the ads on these re-direct/ad DNS servers that ISPs are using these days? My guess is it's probably not Google or why would they offer an alternative? It sounds like a very clever way to attack their online advertising competition to me. Obviously they'd get into some hot water by trying to compete directly with their own advertising based DNS. Instead they attack the entire market of re-direct/ad DNS by offering a clean alternative that happens to hurt their competition. Very clever. It wouldn't surprise me to see some of the Google software (Toolbar, Chrome, Notifier) offer an option to use Google DNS in the future. For the end user it's a good thing -- for Google's competition it's pretty terrible.
- cdibona 17y agoActually, a fair amount of this kind of advertising is Google. Also Yahoo, MS and any number of other providers. Sure doesn't make DNS hijacking right, though. <i>Disclaimer: Work for Google.</i>
- tybris 17y agoNo way, I like my DNS resolvers to be a little stupid. They know way too much about me.
- brianobush 17y agomy opinion on why they are doing this.... to track where you are going. and make sure that site is indexed.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- glisk 17y agoUsing this DNS service will degrade your performance to almost any non-Google rich media content, pure and simple. If you use Google's DNS service, because Google has your client IP, they can serve your content the fastest from the closest POP, however by using this DNS service you are actually creating an issue called "resolver proximity" for every CDN on the planet. This will be especially evident to those of you not in North America who unwittingly point to these servers. In most global markets your best strategy is to use your local DNS resolver so the people who deliver everything from Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, ustream, (etc, etc, etc) understand that you're not in San Jose or Northern Virginia but really in Tokyo or Malaysia. If your ISP uses a DNS server that's "far" away from you (in terms of network latency) you should complain loudly.
- JulianMorrison 17y agoIt's pretty obvious what Google gets out of this: they get your browsing history. My guess if that they'll uprate search results if lots of people visit them.
- defdac 17y agoThis comment will only be funny for Swedes that knows who Ulla-Bella is, and what number he/she always dials...
- ypavan 17y agoDangerous Signs? From their FAQ: >> Is Google Public DNS based on open source software, such as BIND? >> No. Google Public DNS is Google's own implementation of the DNS standards