Google announced this week its Google DNS project, an attempt to speed up the Domain Name System (DNS) you may not realise but when you type in a web address like www.google.com you don't just arrive at the website in question a complex set of exchanges occur between your computer and a set of servers know as the DNS Root these 13 world wide servers house a giant address book on web addresses and a corresponding IP address.

Think of it like a telephone directory you want to speak to Joe Smith but first you need to know his number.

DNS holds the entire fabric of the modern web together the faster it operates the quicker we arrive at the site we were looking for, as I say there are 13 Root servers not many when you think of all those websites and even though the system has been designed so that if even 90% of the DNS servers go offline it will still function Google wants to make sure that it's able to keep everything working if those servers fail for any reasons.

In the past there has been attacks against the Root servers such as Poisoned DNS and DDOS attacks, a poison DNS attempts to hijack a domain name and re-point it to a hacked server allowing users to become infected with viruses and malware.

In a DDOS attack the aim is to flood the server with millions of requests a second taking it offline or slowing it down to a crawl you would be very surprised how often the Root servers get attacked try constantly!

Google is working hard to make even the oldest parts of the web's infastructure faster and more resilient to problems and attacks with Google running a DNS server they can filter out and guard against attacks and use that incredible worldwide datacenter to make DNS requests incredibly fast.

I will put together an article later covering how to change your computers DNS settings to talk to Googles new DNS servers.