The Lowdown on Google DNS

Posted by Lara Bolt on August 27th, 2019

By themselves, computers and other media devices utilize a group of numbers (called IP addresses) to refer to themselves to each other. We hapless humans normally would not need the ability to bear in mind many of these IP addresses, thus we use meaningful and often ordered labels (called hostnames or even if it ought to go online, Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs) instead.

These titles are subsequently kept in a hierarchical model of machines called DNS nameservers. Nameservers are spread all around the universe. There is usually at least one in every domain, company, company, faculty, and associations.

If you are subscribed to an internet service provider (ISP), part of their service is your setup DNS or your connection using their DNS name host. All these ISP name servers often possess caching abilities, in other words, they store DNS query results for a certain amount of time, allowing another computer looking for the exact same URL a result. It is necessary therefore that ISPs maintain their name hosts along with their DNS information secure, fast, and reliable. Regrettably, some ISPs do neglect in a single (or in a few cases even all) of the three criteria.

Enter the public and best free DNS servers. There are a lot of businesses out there (OpenDNS, ScrubIt, DNS advantage, to list a couple ) offering free usage of nameservers to anyone or any devices that need DNS lookups. In setting up these DNS, you simply enter the IP address of one or more of the nameservers. So, Google DNS in fact is not new in the game. What they assert is that as part of their attempt to"make the web faster", they are providing free DNS services which is more secure, faster, and much more reliable we had ever seen previously.

Some online experts conducted some rapid performance tests. A ping to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org) clocks the average rate at 288ms, somewhat slower than my ISP's name servers (clocked at 281ms) but still satisfactorily fast. For non-existent URLs, Google DNS returns with non-domain (NXDOMAIN) answers, which arrive as the usual"Server not Found" error.

This is among the fantastic things which make Google DNS not the same as most public DNS resolvers: Google is saying that they are carrying a stand contrary to NXDOMAIN redirects (i.e. the tactics of many people DNS to divert NXDOMAIN errors into a company-made web site with several links, why not a search engine, however consistently having a lot of annoying advertisements ).