When Google first launched its Public DNS all they way in 2009 it was meant to be an experiment. But since then things have evolved fast for the search giant. Now it has been released to the public the information that the DSN serves up to 70 billion requests transforming it into the largest in the whole wide world.
For those not familiar with what DNS means – well it stands for Domain Name System. Basically what it means is that the service is designed to map alphanumeric domain names to the corresponding numeric IP addresses. Google Public DNS software engineer, Jeremy K. Chen explains it better. Imagine the DNS as the yellow pages of the Internet. And if you had to look out countless phone numbers every single day, your life might depend on the existence of a directory that would turn out to be fast, secure and correct. And Google Public DNS is the provider of that for 70 billion people.
When the service first took off, Google only intended to make the Internet faster, more secure and more easily accessible via search. Chen stated that, remarkably 70% of the traffic of the public DNS comes from outside the borders of the US. “We’ve maintained our strong presence in North America, South America and Europe, and beefed up our presence in Asia. We’ve also added entirely new access points to parts of the world where we previously didn’t have Google Public DNS servers, including Australia, India, Japan and Nigeria.”
Google offers the advantage of never interfering with user, unlike other open DSN providers. InformationWeek has stumbled on the fact that Google has two set of server logs. In one temporary IP addresses are stored which are deleted after 24-48 hours, while the permanent server logs that encrypt city level location data are obliterated from the system within two weeks.
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