Google unveiled yet another free service today, Google Public DNS, which they hope translates into a faster browsing experience for it’s users. If you aren’t familiar with DNS you may think of it like an Internet phone book. If you know a person’s name, using a phone book you can find out how to contact them by finding their phone number. Likewise, if you know a website’s name you may use the DNS infrastructure to determine how to reach them. Here is Google’s explanation:

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.

DNS is therefor a critical component on today’s Internet. Unfortunately, many ISPs and networks alike provide DNS services on severely under-powered hardware that, while doing it’s job, tends to buckle and become unreliable under load. Google hopes that by using their DNS servers over your ISPs that they’ll be faster, more reliable, and safer. Additionally, DNS servers have the ability to cache their name look-ups which loosely means the more people using a server, the more likely the server has already performed a name look-up previously and therefor already has the results for subsequent queries.

Using Google Public DNS is pretty simple, just use the following IP addresses as your primary and secondary DNS:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

In Windows Vista & 7 the DNS servers can be changed through the Network and Sharing Center through the Control Panel.

Locate your Local Area Connection adapter and click Properties.

In the Properties dialog select Internet Protocol Version 4 and click Properties.

In the box titled Use the following DNS server addresses input the IP addresses from above.

OK out of all the dialog windows and you will now be pointing to Google for all your DNS look-ups. Should you wish to go back to your ISPs DNS you can repeat the process above but instead of inputting the IP addresses just choose Obtain DNS server address automatically.