Google recently announced that it has set up a couple of free public DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) in its continuing effort to “speed up” the Internets. Unfortunately after testing them it looks like I’ll be sticking with my Verizon provided DNS servers. Here’s what I found:
I used a great little utility called DNS performance by Silverwolf (please donate) to test the performance of both the Google (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) and Verizon (68.238.64.12, 68.238.96.12) provided DNS servers.
DNS Performance generates a random test set of 10,000 websites from a list of 1000 domains, then queries your systems DNS server with sites from said test set while tracking the number of Milliseconds it takes to get a reply. It conveniently lists the number of queries, best, worst and average.
I ran the tool for a total number of 460 queries (I guess if you wanted real scientific results you could query the whole 10,000 sites in the test set) and here are the results.
The Verizon DNS servers (68.238.64.12, 68.238.96.12):
The Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4)
In conclusion, ladies and jellyspoons, check your local provider’s DNS server performance before switching to Google DNS.
One additional thought I had regarding the Google DNS servers is that using them will probably provide Google with even more valuable statistics about what websites people like to visit. Thereby expanding their already vast insight into surfers’ web preferences. So while free to you, these DNS servers will probably end up making more money for Google in the long run.