Anyone know what Google public DNS is? Not understanding what or how it's used or if even benefits me. Does it provide faster speed? Keeps personal ip hidden? Or is it just another means to track my activity?

DNS (Domain Name of System).

Before 1983 or when the DNS was created, each computer or server connected to the Internet, it was only accessible by typing IP address (example 192.168.21.1), and then to connect to a website before it was necessary to know the exact IP address.

To give you an ex, to connect to Giardiniblog, instead of writing in your browser http://www.giardiniblog.com, before you needed to write 188.121.50.96 which is IP address of this site.

So you can do this even today (in fact if you want to try writing it in your browser GiardiniBlog arrive anyway), but it is not mandatory cause the DNS server now can facilitate navigation, translating an address in ip automatically without us noticing it and without see anything.

You can understand that it is much easier to remember a name instead of a number, and DNS servers are just that, to translate the name of a site in its respect ip address.

The DNS is the service that maps an IP address to the domain of the site, here is a list of DNS server addresses used to make you understand what are:

Google DNS
8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

In layman's terms DNS (Domain Name System) is just a list of website names and IP addresses. Since computers use IP addresses to communicate, when you a person types in a website name in their web browser, their computer uses their DNS to find the website's IP address so it can connect to it.

Does it provide faster speed?

Under normal conditions, no. Unless your DNS provider is currently offline or experiencing problems, then changing your DNS won't benefit you speed wise.

if even benefits me

Changing your DNS can benefit you in 2 ways:

1) Fix DNS errors:
If your DNS provider is offline, then you won't be able to connect to any websites unless you know their IP address or they are cached in your browser. So changing your DNS in this case would fix this error. Which is simply called a "DNS error".

2) Fix DNS lookup delays:
There are times where your DNS provider can be slow. Maybe they are having server problems or maybe they just have higher load than they can handle. Changing your DNS could decrease the time it takes your computer to match a website name to an IP address and open the page.

Keeps personal ip hidden?

No, it doesn't.

Or is it just another means to track my activity?

It's possible for your DNS provider to log what sites try to connect to, but I don't know if any of them do so I can't speak one way or the other about. But I wouldn't worry about it too much. By default most people are probably using the DNS provided by their ISP and your ISP can already see everything you do if they wanted to.


Here's some resources if you're interested in further reading:

http://www.howtogeek.com/167239/7-reaso ... s-service/
http://www.howtogeek.com/122845/htg-exp ... at-is-dns/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pub ... docs/using