Google DNS, Google Caffiene & Google Local Search?

Google didn’t get where they are by being stupid. Those guys at Google really know what they are doing and they are usually able to do things before anyone saw it coming too. They are full of surprises.

Hopefully, you already know about Google Caffeine and Google Local Search. You may have already heard about Google DNS as well. But read this about Google DNS from the Google Code Blog.

A proposal to extend the DNS protocol Wednesday, January 27, 2010Today a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS and Google are publishing a proposal to extend the DNS protocol. DNS is the system that translates an easy-to-remember name like www.google.com to a numeric address like 74.125.45.104. These are the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with one another on the Internet.

ICANN has to approve it before it happens, but ICANN usually signs off on whatever these companies wants to do, so don’t expect a long debate. Vint Cerf, (the inventor of email), used to run ICANN and now works for Google.

By returning different addresses to requests coming from different places, DNS can be used to load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server. For example, if you look up www.google.com from a computer in New York, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in New York City. If you look up www.google.com from the Netherlands, the result could be an IP address pointing to a server in the Netherlands. Sending you to a nearby server improves speed, latency, and network utilization.

Sounds really good doesn’t it? We all want more speed. But there’s more. Right now when that load is balanced, none of your IP Address is passed along from your ISP to the other resolver.

Our proposed DNS protocol extension lets recursive DNS resolvers include part of your IP address in the request sent to authoritative nameservers. Only the first three octets, or top 24 bits, are sent providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy.

That part, as the post states, will not reveal to your whole IP Address to Google, so they won’t know exactly who you are. As long as the agreement ICANN approves does not include some obscure legal clause that states this can change later. As long as Google maintains the “Do no evil” policy.

But this post isn’t about privacy issues. With the launch of Google Caffeine and with Google Local Search becoming more popular, I suspect that Google DNS is part of an overall strategy to make local search even more powerful.

I’m not a DNS expert, but it seems very logical that with Google having the ability to know your general location combined with the ability to send you to the server they want to send you to will have a major impact on Google Search results.

What do you think?