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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The funny part about this claim is that 90+% of Internet users use DNS solely to get to Google. It's really a choice between having one big company tracking your habits, or two, one of which is small, under intense pressure, and hungry.

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That isn't how DNS works. It is true that 90% of users go directly to google, but once there they click on Search results, news results, etc... The browser takes the link and the OS does a DNS lookup to get the ip address of the server hosting that url. Then the browser connects to that server, google is no longer in the picture.

The point was that, for most users, Google is an abstraction over URLs, just like DNS is an abstraction over IP addresses.

Exactly. A lot of people don't remember domain names anymore, they remember the words they need to type into Google in order to bring that site up as the top link.

E.g., if they want to get to Dell's website, rather than typing "dell.com" into the URL field, they type "dell" or "dell computer" into the search box and then click on the first result.

Oddly enough this relates to all the domain squatters out there. If you misstype something into the search bar you don't know what you get, but by clicking on the first link in Google you are taken the to the "reputable" site.

So a reputable DNS service that did this automatically would be a direct threat to Google.

You're also thinking too web-centric. DNS is not only used by web-surfers to construct URLs in their browsers. Things that make sense from a 'how to I find this webpage' sense do not make sense from a 'how does my non-web client contact the non-http server' sense.

IT ALSO BREAKS THE DNS.

Here is the difference between what Google will know:

User A: Google DNS: search for dell, dns lookups; dell.com, chat1.us.dell.com, checkout.dell.com

User B: Non-Google DNS: search for dell

For a large slice of Internet hosts, Google is already getting fine-grained data on what pages you're hitting.

It's not how DNS works, but it is how the Internet works. Google's ability to track users is already in many cases page-granular.

The point I'm making is, it doesn't matter if people use Google for DNS, because they're already handing Google more valuable information. But it does matter if they're handing it to OpenDNS.

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