I just did a comparison and I am 10ms away from the Akamai node returned by my ISP's DNS servers, 88ms away from the node returned by Google Public DNS, and 20ms away from the node returned by OpenDNS. Even if DNS is faster, it may make everything else slower...
but I am willing to sacrifice a few hundred ms to avoid the several seconds of frustration when typing 'gmail' into the firefox address bar gets me redirected to some stupid ass ISP specific SERPs page =D
First, modern CDN's can use anycast (example bitgravity) to control in detail which content server a given user connects too. Second, a CDN operator can anycast it's authority servers to minimize time spent in recursive dns lookups (I believe akamai uses a combination similar to this).
Alternately, a 3rd party dns operator can use anycast to control which resolver a given user uses, ensuring that the resolver is close to the user on the internet. Since google's nameservers are associated with hostnames of the form any-in-XXXX.1e100.net I'd assume they're anycast already or will be in the future.
Use a second window to ping the resulting ip addresses.
edit: these instructions are also valid on linux/freebsd and should also work on OSX
The point most people miss is that all of your habits and information are under one roof and only need one subpoena to get your entire electronic life on DVD. This just adds to what they already know about your searching, emailing , communicating and spending.
It sounds like a good faith effort aimed at speeding things up to me.
My ping from a dedicated 15mb Qwest circuit to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is between 57ms and 75ms. However, cached DNS resolutions run at around 12ms from our default DNS servers. Even uncached resolutions are still way faster than the round-trip to Google.
Google Public DNS might be worth it if every single one of your DNS queries would result in a cache miss, but otherwise I don't see the performance improvement Google is gunning for.
That said, it is nice to have a public option.
quite happy with that
(Disclaimer - I'm a Google employee, I didn't work on this and my opinions are my own.)
Google Public DNS telephone support
877-590-4367 in the U.S.
770-200-1201 outside the U.S.
How are the results from inside US ?
They can crunch the data on queries and infer which sites are popular (and in what geographic regions they're popular).
(vertical integration)