Google announced Thursday a new service called Google Public DNS (Domain Name System), that allows users to utilize the Google DNS servers to access the Internet.

The service, which is still in an experimental phase, attempts to improve on existing DNS technology by making it faster.

The DNS is an important part of the Internet. It converts the text addresses or URL's into the numeric Internet Protocol addresses which is used to locate information on the Internet.

When you visit a Web page, a DNS server that's part of a vast distributed network often must perform that conversion--called resolving a host--many times. With the Google Public DNS service, Google wants to be that server.

To use Google Public DNS, users will have to change network settings so that their Web site requests go to the Google service instead of to their ISP.

Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable, said product manager Prem Ramaswami in a blog post introducing the Google Public DNS service.

Google has set up a Web page with detailed instructions on how to do this and even has phone support.

Google Free