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Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you’re using. We have to do this so that we can spot potentially bad things like DDoS attacks and so we can fix problems, such as particular domains not showing up for specific users.

We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours.

In the permanent logs, we don’t keep personally identifiable information or IP information. We do keep some location information (at the city/metro level) so that we can conduct debugging, analyze abuse phenomena and improve the Google Public DNS prefetching feature. We don’t correlate or combine your information from these logs with any other log data that Google might have about your use of other services, such as data from Web Search and data from advertising on the Google content network. After keeping this data for two weeks, we randomly sample a small subset for permanent storage.
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Anyway, I can see a difference in speed here in Middle Europe :)

http://michaeljung.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/quick-raw-dirty-my-take-on-googles-dns-service-offering/

– I’m finding OpenDNS to be twice as fast on average as the Google DNS service. This is just simple testing running ‘dig @8.8.8.8 http://www.somedomainname.com‘ in a loop for awhile, and extracting the query times. OpenDNS is very consistently 10-12ms with outliers up to 18ms. Google was consistently 24-28ms with a few sub 20ms, but many results over 30ms. Now, this wasn’t scientific, I don’t know if the name was cached or not, but that should be irrelevant after the first query up to the TTL for the domain.

– OpenDNS’ response left out the single biggest reason NOT to use OpenDNS: by default they proxy all requests for google.com through their own service. That means that today OpenDNS does what they claim Google could potentially do in the future. The proxy is easy to turn off if you pay attention, but you need to create an account and you can only turn it off on an IP address or network basis. If you move around a lot and use various wifi hotspots but hardcode OpenDNS’ servers, you’re going to get their proxy of google.com (you can mitigate this a bit by setting up your own /etc/hosts file but then you lose whatever load and geographic balancing google.com does)

I’m sticking with OpenDNS for now, but honestly if they were to be bought by MSFT I’ll drop them faster than a bad SYN-ACK packet.

Hypothetically, were Google to use this data, how would it be useful?
– IP addresses are frequently shared. So while you can definitely tie a lookup to an IP address, that isn’t necessarily an individual. And it could well be another nameserver forwarding a request.
– They could feed the data into the adwords exchange. But the speed at which responses are generated would mean for much faster auctions than they perform today. The data would be more useful as a trend to influence auctions, but would the few seconds in time between the lookup and a potential page rendering of adsense ads really provide much benefit? Is there such a thing as high-speed trading in the ad network world?
– If they were nefarious, they could resolve rival ad networks to their own service to intercept the ads. This would last all of, what, an hour? before an injunction was filed, probably by the same ISPs who do some comparable things today.
– If they were nefarious they could use the data to determine what sites people were going to which DON’T have adsense, and somehow use that to their advantage. But, they have an index (in theory) of the entire public web, so they should have this information already.
– From a network engineering perspective it could give them even more insight into the topology of the Internet than they have today since DNS is typically served over UDP and not TCP. I don’t know what that insight would be or how it would be different from the reams of data they collect from serving ads and Youtube already.

The one benefit that makes sense to me at the moment is that, as naïve as it sounds, it helps speed up web pages, even by a few tenths of a second. We know Google obsesses about millisecond differences in search results resulting in million dollar shifts of revenue. If they could apply that sort of optimization to the web as a whole for what’s got to be a drop in the capital expense bucket for them to provide this service, why not?

The only real issue I’m having is how much of what I do is Google controlled. 99.9% of my searches are through Google, now 100% off my traffic will also be sent through them..that’s a bit scary if you think about the level of control they “could” exert.

Well I didn’t fully switch, I still route through a local DNS for our development studio .. but that’s for internal domains anyway :D

Do I notice a difference – nah not really

Which Google have specifically said they won’t do with Google DNS.