NW Linux : blog

Google and their business partners are interested in speeding up the web with a new routing protocol. The new protocol would geo-target Net traffic by using your location information in your web request. Currently, web traffic uses the Dynamic Naming System (DNS) to translate names to ip addresses. When you click a link for rbucky.com, the computer does not know where to route traffic unless servers somewhere out on the web tell it what computer ip address to visit. All of this DNS stuff would be moot if we simply used ip addresses, but that would not be fun…

Googles proposed EDNS0 protocol would route these DNS queries more effectively based on the requesting computer – that would be you. For example, if a person in the Netherlands were to make a Google request, your computer would request the information from Google the provide you with an answer. Unfortunately, the traffic might end up routing to servers in California, USA, then traveling back to you in the Netherlands. That trip just cost valuable time and resources. Sure, we are talking about milliseconds here, but multiply that by the number of web users world wide, and the time and resource savings is astronomical.

Using Google’s proposed EDNS0 protocol, information from your request would locate the origin of your request and route it to the closest, more efficient servers. Google has already implemented a public DNS service to help along the process. Implementing a geo-target system would dramatically increase the efficiency of Net traffic to say the least. If you were a computer, why would you want to travel half way around the world for an answer, when it was really only 100 miles away. It just plain makes sense.

For detailed information, read more on the Google Code blog.