Google proposes geo-smart Internet speedup

Google and other companies interested in addressing the system of the Internet have suggested a technology they hope will get net users to servers around quickly.

This technology is called the Domain Name System, which resolves alphabetical Net addresses like CNET.com on numeric addresses actually used to achieve the appropriate server. Interest in Google's DNS is so strong, the company launched its own service in an effort to reduce some of the delays that may occur when the network equipment closest to a pure user has a numerical address for a particular server immediately to hand.

The move is not interesting just because it has the potential to accelerate a very common chore - Resolution DNS queries take place several times a day, a person searching the Internet, send e-mail, and perform other tasks on the Internet. It is also interesting because it shows the willingness of Google to gradually re-engineer the Internet not only provide its own services. The company is also active in developing and promoting a variety of Web standards.

The process of finding the correct numerical address called DNS resolution, and this may involve several steps request hopping from server to server tries to find the right answer. The problem is that sometimes by the time the answer is recovered from the far side of the planet and give a geographically inappropriate response. In general, the farther away the server is, the slower communication with it.

Think of it as looking up a price point in Oakland and get the answer in U.S. dollars instead of U.S. dollars in New Zealand. Sure, you can do the math to get the local response, but an extra step.

This is where Google and Neustar UltraDNS come in they proposed a DNS extension Wednesday to try to build some geographic smarts in the system.

Specifically, the proposed extension, called Client IP information requests DNS, will send along the first three quarters of a user's Internet Protocol (IP) to request DNS. The last quarter will be lopped off to keep some privacy, but the first part should be enough to target geographically to answer in some cases. Its purpose would be for example the return address for the Dutch servers of Google, not California server of Google, a person in the Netherlands needed to do.

Next up: evaluation of the proposal. "We intend to continue working with all interested parties on the implementation of this solution and look forward to a healthy debate on DNSEXT list," said Google Public group members DNS Wilmer van der Gaast and Carlo Contavalli in a blog post on the proposal.