What exactly is Google Public DNS. Google Public DNS is a free (DNS) resolution service. What's the Fuss about it?. Is it Really faster?

Q.What does this mean exactly?
A. Basically every time you go to a domain name like www.dogs.com, this address must be resolved to an IP address for you to communicate with this could be often slow as your ISP's DNS server's are doing alot of resolutions and servers are overloaded.

Q. So what's the fuss about Google Free Public DNS?
A. They claim that their servers have better load balancing (meaning are able to balance and distribute all that heavy work better)

Q. Why should I set it up?
A. Google Claims it is faster and more secure. (let's see this test below)

OK, so i put this to test with my isp.

I did some general ping test:

I pinged the Google primary DNS  and got:

After this I pinged Cogeco's my ISP's DNS Server:

Cogeco has the following DNS server,

So I decided to ping the first one, and got the following result.

Its show that my ISP server is replying faster to Ping-Pong times, ok Interesting so I went a step further, since I am not running Unix/Linux I do not know the alternative for Windows, if you do let me know. Anyways so I used

http://www.geektools.com/digtool.php (Thanks!), to test DNS resolution times.

I am going to test http://www.egov.sy/ (A Government site in Saudi Arabia)

Using the Google's primary DNS server  i got the following result:

;; Total query time: 292 msec
;; FROM: gp.centergate.com to SERVER: 8.8.8.8
;; WHEN: Wed Jan 27 10:42:24 2010
;; MSG SIZE  sent: 29  rcvd: 45

Now I am going to use Cogeco DNS servers and see whats up! (24.226.1.126)

;; Total query time: 459 msec
;; FROM: gp.centergate.com to SERVER: 24.226.1.126
;; WHEN: Wed Jan 27 10:44:42 2010
;; MSG SIZE  sent: 29  rcvd: 264

Conclusion: Google DNS was faster for me,  I tired some of the other Cogeco DNS servers and Google still had a Total query time which was shorter. So where else could this be useful?.

• Airport(s)/Hotel(s) or Hot Spot networks, they might be using slow DNS servers
• When travelling outside of the country, and trying to connect to sites hosted in North America
• When connectiong to different Google Services, Google Voice, Analytics (Basically this is already in the Google DNS cache server, so you don't have to wait for this information to come back to you)
• When you know your ISP is having DNS problems!

To change these settings in Windows 7, simply go to

Wireless Connection: Browse to Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections

Select the connection you want to Change (We are doing Wi-Fi in this example) Click on it

then click Properties:

Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and click Properties (it will become active as you highlight the Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)

Once there you should see the following screen:

1. Select Use the following DNS server addresses:

Preferred DNS server: 8.8.8.8
Secondary DNS server: 8.8.4.4

and hit OK and you are done, (NOTE: To change back to your ISP's DNS server simply select Obtain DNS server address automatically, and this will revert your old settings)