Google Becomes World's Biggest Public DNS Provider

The Internet giant Google revealed on Tuesday that it has become the largest public DNS service in the world, handling an average of more than 70 billion requests a day,

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is a service that maps alphanumeric domain names to the corresponding numeric IP addresses.

According to Google Public DNS software engineer, Jeremy K. Chen, the DNS acts like the phone book of the Internet. “If you had to look up hundreds or thousands of phone numbers every day, you’d want a directory that was fast, secure and correct. That’s what Google Public DNS provides for tens of millions of people,” he said in the Google official blog.

The company launched Google Public DNS on December 2009 with an intention of providing a faster web service to users. Chen claimed that 70 percent of the traffic of the public DNS comes from outside the US.

Chen wrote, “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.”

Chen mentioned that Google has come up with a way to pass information to the content distribution networks (CDNs) so that users can be sent directly to the nearby servers. He also added that Google has taken steps to support IPv6.