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Google Launches “Google Public DNS” to Speed up the Web

As another addition to their “let’s make the web faster” project, Google launched an open DNS service called Google Public DNS (clever name, eh?) earlier today. if you’re tech savvy and would like to try out their new DNS service, simply change your default or otherwise-set DNS servers to [8.8.8.8] and [8.8.4.4] and you’re ready to go. if you’re not quite sure how to do this, but still want to give it a go, they’ve kindly included some documentation regarding how to get yourself up and running: [configuration instructions].

What’s the purpose of creating yet another DNS service? Google claims that theirs is different – and better. Most DNS servers cache only extremely popular sites such as Google itself, Facebook, Twitter, etc. in order to more quickly serve those commonly-loaded pages. Google is taking that caching to another level, and using their own prefetching technology, they periodically cache even the most uncommon of websites (while supposedly imposing a rate limit on their prefetch requests so as not to tax the nameservers in question). this limit will prevent Google’s caching servers from overloading the nameservers with requests and causing DoS attacks, while still having a recently-cached name resolution available for the client upon request.

These clever techniques and technologies, will, although perhaps not noticeably on most pages, enhance the request times for pages which require many DNS lookups and the websites who require many nameservers. if you would still like more information, their introduction page and other pages linked to therein are a great place to start.

“Speeding up the web” with only a DNS service seems like a pretty ambitious goal, but Google’s been known to pull off some incredible stuff in the past. We’ll see what happens.

Read more: Google Public DNS Website

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Google Public DNS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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