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Comment by todd3834 | Hacker News Reader

Now Google can make cash off typo domains by turning it into a Google search and hopefully earning some sponsor link clicks. Not a bad idea. I wonder if they are going to record requested URLs so they know which ones have high traffic to spider more often... I can see a lot of reasons why Google would want to offer this.

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"If you issue a query for a domain name that does not exist, Google Public DNS always returns an NXDOMAIN record, as per the DNS protocol standards." http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq.html#nxdomains

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

More like record every URL you visit, and use the content of those websites to determine intent, and then target ads accordingly.

Eh, I don't know if they'll be able to do that too effectively because of NAT and whatnot, but they can certainly use this information in their PageRank calculation. Knowing what pages people visit is an even bigger vote of confidence for the site than seeing how many pages link to it.

Assume you are logged in or you have a gmail cookie, hell yeah they know.

You're aware that HTTP cookies are not sent to DNS servers, yes?

Yes. I meant if you're not behind a NAT they can correlate your IP with your gmail cookie when you do a search and thereby link a record of the sites you are visiting to your profile to serve you more targeted ads. Apologies for the ambiguity.

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