Google acknowledges XKCD #1361

Time was, that was Sun's core product...

Is this a paul graham joke?

pingoo

They probably did put it in but forgot about markdown.

I guess, for Google at least, getting all DNS requests of their users is worth paying for a popular DNS server. That's how they know which sites your like even if those sites don't use Google Analytics.

Sure, they benefit by getting valuable data on Internet traffic. For another example of DNS server monetization, see http://opendns.com/.

Turns out there are clever ways of (mis)using DNS features to make money. For example, your server could hijack NXDOMAIN responses and instead direct the user to a nice page that tells them that the name couldn't be resolved alongside a couple relevant advertisements.

People use Google much more if they can access it fast, which means more revenue. A lot of ISPs have slow DNS servers, and Google needs a good production DNS server for internal purposes anyways, so it was not that hard for the engineers to make it a public project.

>We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information.

This may actually be true, as google believe's that if you arrive faster to a website after searching on Google you will use Google more

What could Google possibly do with people telling them every website they are visiting?

Also, at the scale Google operates, I am not sure that DNS is that big of a resource commitment, and it may allow them to do fancy traffic routing stuff for their own services.

Google's core business.

Google's ping-back server.

It is also a DNS server.

See also: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/

The tooltip is an integral part of xkcd.

it's also a DuckDuckGo instant answer (any xkcd comic) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xkcd+1361