Faster web browsing using Google's DNS servers

A great news that I was waiting for!! You can now have faster web browsing experience using Google's DNS services!!

Google has launched a Public DNS (Domain Name Service) server and the details are available here.

Simply put, you can abandon the DNS IP addresses given by your ISPs like MTNL, BSNL or local Broadband provider and use the Google DNS IP addresses 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 

What is DNS? Simply put - when you type in a website address 'Name' on your web browser, say like http://www.google.com, your computer queries a DNS server (setup by your systems DNS setting IP address!!) to get an IP address (in this case http://www.google.com translates to http://209.85.231.99), and then proceeds to connect to the IP address that it gets from the DNS server. The above process is called as 'Name to IP address' resolving and is a very critical part (and time consuming) of every web browsing activity.

Generally, if the DNS server of your local ISP server is not configured/ administered properly, the 'Name to IP address' resolving takes some time. And when you realise that a single web page has many such 'Names', using the Google Public DNS server will save considerable time during the web browsing.


The Advantages?? Definitely faster browsing speed which would be noticeable. On a Linux machine, you can check yourself the speed advantages by giving these commands at the command prompt and comparing the time shown (my results showed a 50% time saving!!):

time dig @ www.blogspot.com

time dig @8.8.8.8 www.blogspot.com

time dig @8.8.4.4 www.blogspot.com

Other advantages (quoting from the Google Blog!):

• Speed: Resolver-side cache misses are one of the primary contributors to sluggish DNS responses. Clever caching techniques can help increase the speed of these responses. Google Public DNS implements prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires, we refresh the record continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back.
• Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.
• Validity: 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.