Google claims Public DNS now biggest in the world

From an "experimental" service meant to make the Internet faster for everyone, Google's Public DNS (Domain Name System) is now the biggest DNS service in the world.

 

Google Public DNS software engineer Jeremy Chen said the service, which started in 2009, now handles some 70 billion requests a day.

 

"We launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 to help make the web faster for everyone. Today, we’re no longer an experimental service. We’re the largest public DNS service in the world, handling an average of more than 70 billion requests a day," Chen said in a blog post.

 

He noted DNS acts like the phone book of the Internet, translating numerical Internet addresses to get computers to the sites they want to visit.

 

Chen said Google Public DNS has particularly become popular for international users.

 

Presently, he said 70 percent of its traffic comes from outside the United States.

 

"We’ve maintained our strong presence in North America, South America and Europe, and beefed up our presence in Asia. We've also added entirely new access points to parts of the world where we previously didn't have Google Public DNS servers, including Australia, India, Japan and Nigeria," he said.

 

Working with CDNs

 

Chen said Google Public DNS made a technical proposal shortly after it launched for how public DNS services can work better with content distribution networks (CDNs) that have servers all of the world.

 

"We came up with a way to pass information to CDNs so they can send users to nearby servers. Our proposal, now called 'edns-client-subnet,' continues to be discussed by members of the Internet Engineering Task Force. While we work with the IETF, other companies have started experimenting with implementing this proposal," he said.

 

He also said Google has taken steps to help support IPv6, we announced its IPv6 addresses: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844 to supplement its original addresses, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. — RSJ, GMA News