Is there anything that Google can’t do? As part of its never-ending quest to update and improve the web experience for all, Google today launched a new free public DNS service.
DNS is critically important technology that we all of use everyday. It’s the system that resolves IP addresses to domain names and usually you get that info from your ISP (or in a big enterprise your own DNS server).
What Google’s Public DNS will offer is an alternative, enabling users to use Google (instead of their ISP) to provide DNS service.
“We believe that a faster DNS infrastructure could significantly improve
the browsing experience for all web users,” Prem Ramaswami, of Google’s Public DNS Team wrote in a blog post. “To enhance DNS speed but to
also improve security and validity of results, Google Public DNS is
trying a few different approaches that we are sharing with the broader
web community.”
Altruistic ideals of enhancing the web experience aside, by having its own DNS server for public consumption, Google will also potentially gain access to a new source of Internet information.
They will know (anonymously or otherwise) how popular certain sites are (based on query volume) and potentially have a new metric by which they can improve web search quality as well (*though they do have a privacy policy in place which protects against user-identifiable information).