Digital Home Thoughts: Google Launches Public DNS

"When you type www.wikipedia.org into your browser's address bar, you expect nothing less than to be taken to Wikipedia. Chances are you're not giving much thought to the work being done in the background by the Domain Name System, or DNS. Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out. Most of us aren't familiar with DNS because it's often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names - e.g., www.google.com - into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers - e.g., 74.125.45.100 - that computers use to communicate with one another."

In a nutshell, Google is offering to replace the DNS you're probably using right now from your ISP - the advantage to you being more speed. Some people are raising concerns over the privacy policy, which seems to indicate that for 24-48 hours, Google has the option to use information such as which Web sites you visit to shape which AdSense ads they show you. I'm not sure if that's a big deal, though just to be on the safe side I think I'm going to give OpenDNS another try.