Google Wants to Speed Up the Web

Google just launched the Google Public DNS. Just like OpenDNS, Google Public DNS will allow users to bypass their ISPs Domain Name Servers (DNS). DNS servers are, in many respects, the backbone of the Internet. DNS allows you to type a domain name like www.senate.gov into a browser instead of a machine-readable IP number like http://156.33.195.33/. Google argues that it wants to give consumers an alternative to their ISPs’ DNS services in order to make the Internet “faster, safer and more reliable.”

According to Google product manager Prem Ramaswami, the company’s engineers have been working to improve DNS over the last few months. Instead of performing DNS lookups on an ISP’s DNS server, Google will use its data-center and caching infrastructure to resolve these domain names.

After SPDY (which augments HTTP), this is Google’s second major project that touches upon the core infrastructure of the Web.