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Comment by drp | Hacker News Reader

This was inevitable, and will give OpenDNS some major competition. Google could make tons of money from ads and sponsored results on error pages.

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Actually the whole point of this is to not redirect error pages. If you read the blog post, you'll see that they address this (and privacy concerns). DNS redirection is pretty evil and I'm proud of Google for working against it.

(Disclaimer - I'm a Google employee, I didn't work on this and my opinions are my own.)

Is displaying a "that domain doesn't exist" page considered redirection? Otherwise what would you see in your browser?

I wouldn't say OpenDNS is evil. Offering an ad-supported free service is how many things are allowed to continue existing.

The browser's built-in handling of names that don't resolve

Your browser has a built in page for "domain does not exist". Google cannot place ads on it. On the other hand if you set up OpenDNS and then go to "doesnotexit123411452345.com", it will likely redirect you to something like "ads.opendns.com/?search=doesnotexist", which breaks DNS, life and the Universe. OpenDNS provides an option to turn off this type of redirection, but if you have a residential connection with a dynamic IP, all of a sudden that setting might just disappear.

Avoid OpenDNS and IPS's that do this.

One of my corporate clients had their ISP move to OpenDNS for DNS services. It caused an endless stream of headaches for me as all of the various scientists employed there started complaining about the OpenDNS result pages (which also broke some other user habits they had -- they were used to being able to type "wikipedia" into Firefox's address bar and be redirected directly to wikipedia, for example).

I couldn't get the ISP to budge and the client didn't want to change ISPs, so I ended up setting everybody up on some public SBC DNS servers I know about.

With all respect due to davidu, this "functionality" in OpenDNS has caused me to feel a raging hatred for it every time its name is mentioned.

Rogers does the same thing with 404 pages here in Canada.

Another worrying thing I noticed the other day is that they have a "feature" which injects an HTML header into the page you're requesting if you are approaching your bandwidth limit.

We all know that our ISPs are inspecting our packets, but it's a little disconcerting to see the pages you request manipulated in such a wholesale fashion.

OpenDNS is an easy way to keep the kids out of most of the uglier sites on the internet. That's why I use it.

What do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do? Ironic coming from the largest advertising and redirection company in the world. :-)

Still, users having choice and forcing businesses to compete to win is good for end users and I support that 100%.

"What do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do?"

Not DNS redirection.

> What do you think the Google Toolbar and Chrome do?

DNS redirection affects ALL programs that are trying to access a network address (obviously unless directly by IP). So when my Jabber/XMPP client tries to contact doesnotexist.example.com, being redirected to an advertisement page doesn't help me very much, does it?

Google Toolbar and Google Chrome defaulting to Google as a 'landing page' of sorts only affects your web experience and only when using those pieces of software. This is a far cry from Comcast's DNS servers resolving ALL DNS traffic that should return 'does not exist' to their advert-filled web servers.

There are no error pages when a domain isn't found.

If a DNS server presents an IP so you can show people a web page ( like Verisign did intentionally a few years ago [1]) instead of returning 'no such domain' (NXDOMAIN), you break DNS for all apps that expect a host that's not registered to not resolve. Verisign's screwup lasted 20 days.

I doubt Google would do this.

[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder

I wonder what advantages they have over OpenDNS

For one, they correctly return the expected DNS error when you make a request that cannot be resolved.

You can turn that off

As stated by others though, if you're on a dynamic IP connection it's possible (likely, even) that the setting won't stick forever.

I'm tired of all those stupid "you get shafted by default but you can 'opt-out' if you don't like it so what's the problem?!" schemes.

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