Google’s Public DNS service now has Australian presence

Google has overnight confirmed its Public DNS service designed to offer faster web speeds now has an Australian server, a move that has previously snuck under the radar.

By caching, or making available much faster the IP address of website when a user types in a domain name in their web browser, Google says it’s able to significantly reduce load times and make web browsing much faster.

When Google – a company that is all about speed – launched its Public DNS service in 2010, initially no servers were located in or near Australia meaning those in the country wanting to use the service would have to send requests to the company’s overseas servers instead.

However in a post on the company’s official blog yesterday, Google confirmed it has in fact now deployed Australian servers to facilitate local users.

“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,”  Jeremy Chen, a software engineer for Google Public DNS wrote in the post.

“Today, we’re no longer an experimental service. We’re the largest public DNS service in the world, handling an average of more than 70 billion requests a day.”

To use Google’s system (others such as OpenDNS already existed prior to Google’s Public DNS launch) users are required to change their DNS settings, for which instructions can be found here.