Google's Public DNS Service Hits 70 Billion Daily Queries

Google Public DNS launched a couple of years ago as a public DNS service, designed to replace the ones provided by the ISPs touting speed as the main draw. The service has become rather popular, Google boasts that it now sees some 70 billion DNS requests per day.

That's a significant number of requests, more than many ISPs. Google also boasts that its DNS service has tens of millions of users, though it doesn't provide an exact number.

For comparison, OpenDNS announced that it was seeing 30 billion DNS queries every day last summer. It had 30 million daily users at the time, but said it would cross the 40 million mark soon.

Google Public DNS works around the world, but served users in several areas better, simply because the servers were closer.

"Google Public DNS has become particularly popular for our users internationally. Today, about 70 percent of its traffic comes from outside the U.S. We’ve maintained our strong presence in North America, South America and Europe, and beefed up our presence in Asia," Google explained.

Google also announced that it added several new servers for its Public DNS service in places it didn't previously serve, like Australia, India, Japan and Nigeria.

Last year, Google's Public DNS also added support for IPv6 connections as well as a couple of IPv6 addresses for users to connect to: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844. Google's DNS service uses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. as IPv4 addresses.

"Shortly after launch, we made a technical proposal for how public DNS services can work better with some kinds of important web hosts (known as content distribution networks, or 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," Google added.

It continues work on this proposal which is being discussed with members of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Both Google Public DNS and OpenDNS currently support the extension, known as edns-client-subnet.