Google unveils free DNS service

Cubit · December 3, 2009, 10:49am

I currently use OpenDNS on my home network, but I think I’ll give this a try to test performance.

stusser · December 3, 2009, 11:03am

Another google service entirely bereft of a business model, with the understanding that anything that makes web browsing better indirectly benefits google. Interesting.

Joe_M · December 3, 2009, 11:15am

Is there really any benefit to using this service?

Fugitive · December 3, 2009, 11:17am

They claim that they have better security against things like DNS cache poisoning attacks, and they probably do compared to J. Random ISP, but OpenDNS is probably just as good at that.

Cubit · December 3, 2009, 11:20am

Some ISP dns services can be pretty bad.

Damien_Neil · December 3, 2009, 11:26am

They won’t do NXDOMAIN redirection, which is a pretty big benefit right there.

TimElhajj · December 3, 2009, 11:28am

What is NXDOMAIN redirection and why would I want it, er, not want them to do it?

Lunch_of_Kong · December 3, 2009, 11:31am

Non-Existant Domain.

That’s when you mistype an address in your web browser, and instead of the dns server saying ‘huh, what?’ and your browser showing you a server not found error, your ISP redirects you to a page of their choice full of advertisements.

Charles · December 3, 2009, 11:35am

My ISP just started doing that recently so I think I’ll switch over to Google. Why not. Might as well dive right in, they can already read all my emails, and tell me everything there is to know about me based on my searches, so why not add all the websites I frequent in there too?

AndrewMyers · December 3, 2009, 11:37am

Another benefit: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are super-easy to remember :)

TimElhajj · December 3, 2009, 11:38am

Oh, yeah. Gimme some of that stuff. Thanks Roger!

wisefool · December 3, 2009, 11:39am

Which means they could make the address bar be the new google searchbar.

Go to google.com
automagically removes yahoo/bing all that crap off search
???
Profit.

Tracy_Baker · December 3, 2009, 11:43am

I looked at the documentation on that page and didn’t see anything about providing the kind of content filtering that OpenDNS does. Did I miss something, because I love that fact that OpenDNS won’t even let me go to sites that try to inject malware?

EDIT: Nope, no filtering.

Google DNS FAQ:

Google Public DNS is not, however, any of the following:

* A top-level domain (TLD) name service. Google is not an operator of top-level domain servers (generic or country-code), such as Verisign.
* A DNS hosting or failover service. Google Public DNS is not a third-party DNS application service provider, such as DynDNS, that hosts authoritative records for other domains.
* An authoritative name service. Google Public DNS servers are not authoritative for any domain. Google maintains a set of other nameservers that are authoritative for domains it has registered, hosted at ns[1-4].google.com.
* A malware-blocking service. Google Public DNS does not perform blocking or filtering of any kind.

Cubit · December 3, 2009, 11:47am

Google’s service doesn’t block anything. It says right there on their page:

What Google Public DNS isn’t:
A malware-blocking service. Google Public DNS does not perform blocking or filtering of any kind.

That is either a good thing, or a bad thing depending on your perspective.

Tracy_Baker · December 3, 2009, 11:51am

I’ll definitely put up with the OpenDNS NXDOMAIN redirects in that case. It’s nice to be able to enable basic malware content filtering on everything connected to the network so easily, and OpenDNS recently made SmartCache (one of their premium services) available to everyone for free.

Joe_M · December 3, 2009, 12:29pm

Oh okay, thanks for the info guys. I’ll try it out in a bit! (qwest oddly doesn’t display advertisements but a generic HI, YOU LOST? page)

WhollySchmidt · December 3, 2009, 2:39pm

My friend said this in response:

I’ll continue to use my ISP’s DNS servers for the following reasons:
1). Network speed - My ISP’s servers are less hops away than googles. Since DNS is one of the most frequent of network accesses, even a couple cache hits to TWC’s local DNS servers speed things greatly.
2). Privacy - I don’t want google knowing every time I go to my credit card company/bank/401K/torrent/Porno website. They’ll be able to see any time you access any website (really anything on the internet that uses DNS), what the address is, etc.
3). Marketing data - Google’s main income stream is off of adwords. They can trivially redirect HTTP requests to their own servers with a pass-thru to the real server and the insert a frame/JavaScript layer with an ad in it. What better way to target advertising is there than having the platform to insert ads even when we’re not looking at a google controlled website…

So I said Google’s privacy policy seems reasonable at a glance to me, and that at it’s core, my ISP is just another company with its own motives, so why would I trust them more (or less) than Google? He followed up with

Do you pay Google a monthly bill for their services like you pay your ISP? They’ve got to make money somehow, and they’re selling targetted access of you to advertisers (They do it with gmail too, but DNS is too low level of a thing for me to turn over)

His stance still feels like anti-google-paranoia to me, is he crazy or are those reasonable concerns?

Linoleum · December 3, 2009, 2:42pm

Considering the stated privacy policy, I’d say yes:
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html

sleepconvention · December 3, 2009, 2:47pm

What is a DNS service?

Cubit · December 3, 2009, 2:50pm

DNS servers keep track of what domain names point to what IP addresses.