Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has become the largest public DNS provider in the world, serving more than 70 billion requests a day. On the official Google blog, Google Public DNS software engineer Jeremy Chen announced the milestone, noting that the service has become particularly popular for users internationally. Not bad from a service launched as an experimental service with little fanfare in December 2009.

"About 70 percent of its traffic comes from outside the U.S," wrote Chen. "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."

Depending on your feelings towards Google, this may announcement may thrill you--or deeply frighten you. Cricket Liu, vice president of network equipment maker Infoblox, sums up the situation, as reported on InformationWeek: "Google is providing fast, unfiltered DNS, and all of that is good. But they're also grabbing this huge stream of data, generated by all those people who use the company's DNS service."

The official FAQ for the Google Public DNS service states that IP addresses, ISPs and location information are stored to make the service better, though IP information is erased after 24 hours. Google says it has no intention of using the service to sell ads in the future.

Assuming that you belong to the more charitable camp, and are perhaps considering Google's DNS service, do note that the service is intended for end users and hence offered without an SLA. As such, Google suggests having a backup or failover service.

For more:
- check out this article at ZDNet
- check out this article at InformationWeek

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