Google Public DNS Servers
This blog is rapidly becoming a blog about Google. That's not the plan, but it seems Google makes the news every week with a crazy new initiative. This week : the Google Public DNS Servers.
Of course, there are other free alternatives (other than your ISP's servers). OpenDNS has been a popular and quite reliable one for years. Google's initiative is interesting because, well, it's Google and that brings a lot of interesting questions (Google has a FAQ available).
The first one for many is one of privacy. That to me, is a non issue. For one thing, regardless of what you think Google may know about you or how much they care about you personally, remember that your ISP knows (or can know) a whole lot more than any web sites out there. Anything you type, anything you visit goes through them. Using Google as a DNS server is hardly threatening in my opinion.
The second question is why. Why is Google doing this? As with Chrome, Chrome OS and SPDY, Google lately is all about speed. They want to make the Web faster and DNS queries is one of the areas where a speed improvement could be achieved and Google jumped on the idea. For one thing, Google has tens of thousands of servers world-wide and Google must pay its bandwidth as cheaply as it's humanly possible to at this point, so they are well positioned to enter the market.
Of course, a public DNS is also interesting because it's yet another way Google can aggregate data about us and make their ads make even more sense. That's not a popular thing to say, but you have to think that was one of the reasons behind the move and I mean, why not? If you're going to show me ads, might as well show me stuff that might interest me.
Those worried about privacy need not apply however. As for me, I'll enjoy the extra speed the service has brought me so far.