Is there anything Google isn’t going to do? Google has recently announced Google Public DNS services for Web engines and other systems to query for address resolution. This makes some sense, as Google crawls the Web frequently and has a good idea of where Web presences are located. The goals of this service are to provide an option for current DNS configuration, reduce ISP loads, and make the Web faster.

I have historically used ISP DNS information for all information but have supplemented that with another ISP’s public DNS servers as a secondary server. The thought of Google providing a DNS service is appealing at this point, and I’ve set it on a few servers in my test environment. So far, it works fine as expected.

Google’s DNS offers two IP addresses. They are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, which are very easy to remember. Configuring a few systems with this DNS engine is straightforward and resolves in a standard fashion. Figure A shows a DNS query run against the Google DNS servers.

Figure A


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While taking advantage of this service may seem attractive, there are concerns with using a popular and very public DNS server. Above all, we are not given any information about how much traffic is going to use these addresses. This is not relevant for resolution, as the Google DNS is not authoritative for any domain,  but it is in the security area. Google has outlined a number of security features for this service, documented on the Google Code Web site.

Realistically, I see the Google DNS entries as being used in conjunction with your ISP’s DNS. Do you see yourself implementing Google’s DNS? Concerned about a target like this? Share your comments below.