DNS abbreviation for Domain Name System is a service lookup used to find the IP address of a Server/Host based on Fully qualified Domain name (FQDN)) is an essential part for the smooth working of Internet and speedy access to surf the web. DNS resolves and translates domain names (e.g. www.tech-mania.com) which is meaningful to humans into the IP address in numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networked server or host so that requests routed though the Internet can locate the address of the devices worldwide.

For example, when you enter www.tech-mania.com it is the domain name of the website. Your browser does not directly know which server on the internet is supposed to provide content for this website. This is where DNS resolution comes in, DNS servers act like telephone directories, where instead of finding a telephone number from a given person’s name, you fine an IP address from a given domain name.All this happens automatically, and you usually wont really need to configure anything, as your computer will automatically use the DNS servers provided by your ISP.

By connecting to Internet through ISP (Internet Service Provider), and getting an local IP address with DHCP automatically getting the settings, most system has silently used the DNS servers of the ISP without user noticing. People who feels that DNS service from ISP is not up to par, slow, unreliable or fail to resolve many web address now has one more free public DNS service to choose from, in addition to OpenDNS.

In Google’s continuing effort to speed up each and every part of your internet experience, Google has now launched it’s own DNS service. The new service allows you to use Google specified DNS servers to speed up you internet access by resolving names faster.Google Public DNS is a public DNS resolver launched with an effort to make the web browsing faster, according to official Google Blog.

Google though has a broader reach and stands to gain more ground in switching people to use faster DNS servers. This is surely a beneficial service to the many who never knew such options existed.Having it’s own DNS google will be able to monitor/analyze the web traffic more effectively. Ad-sense could be first to get benefited by analytical data collected google DNS log.

According to launch announcement , features of Google Public DNS include:

Speed: Resolver-side cache misses are one of the primary contributors to sluggish DNS responses. Clever caching techniques can help increase the speed of these responses. Google Public DNS implements prefetching: before the TTL on a record expires, we refresh the record continuously, asychronously and independently of user requests for a large number of popular domains. This allows Google Public DNS to serve many DNS requests in the round trip time it takes a packet to travel to our servers and back.

Security: DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website. Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages.

Validity: Google Public DNS complies with the DNS standards and gives the user the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user’s browsing experience.

The best about Google Public DNS is extremely easy to remember IP addresses:

8.8.8.8

8.8.4.4

To use google Public DNS as the default DNS servers, just configure system or router/gateway network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as the DNS servers.Once done restart browser, Run this on the command prompt to Clear DNS cache

C:\ipconfig/flushdns

Now your ready to test this out.See screeenshot below on where you need to change

In case you need help Google also provides comprehensive configuration instructions .If you have come this far, it is worthwile to try out openDNS as well, the instructions to using it are the same as those for Google Public DNS, except that you need to use the openDNS DNS servers which have the following addressed: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.OpenDNS provides far more features than Google’s service, and allows you to register for an account and customize many facets of its operation. It even allows you to set up shortcuts for frequently used websites, and can set to correct typos in web addresses as well.I have tried this out it was good may be i ll use it more and see and then after a through benchmark would be able to say which is faster OpenDNS or as that of Google’s.Do let me know how fast it for you.

The author/Admin is a Software engineer and currently pursuing his MBA.His interests include blogging anything about technology,music dance and bike racing.