OpenDNS responsible for recent Google redirects
By Jonathan Schlaffer
A few days ago, I wrote that Google was responsible for some redirects that were occurring but that is not the case. I offer my apologies to Google for wrongly accusing it but at the time there was no way to know better. But now I do and the blame lies with OpenDNS.
For those of you that don’t know, OpenDNS is a free service you can configure to use on your router hardware, operating system or both. The service claims to offer faster and more reliable DNS queries.
Other features the service offer include,
Content Filtering
Phising Detection
Domain Blocking
Adult Site Blocking
Web Proxy Blocking
I’m sure you get the picture by now. All in all it’s an excellent service except when it decides to redirect Google searches. For some reason, recent Google searches have been redirected to www.l.google.com when using OpenDNS. In other words, OpenDNS was redirecting Google searches through its own servers and it’s not clear why.
When this happened, Site Advisor also became disabled because it does not index www.l.google.com. While there is some security and speed to be gained by using OpenDNS, until it resolves this issue, I will be turning it off on all my computers and routers.
I would rather trade OpenDNS functionality for Site Advisor functionality and a tiny loss in security and speed any day.
After removing the OpenDNS service from my routers and rebooting them, the problem of the Google redirects is gone. I may go back to using OpenDNS one day, when this problem is solved. However, some quick searches turned up this is not the first time this has happened on the OpenDNS service.
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Entry was posted
on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
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Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
Stumble It!
March 18th, 2008
First off, thanks for the time and effort you’ve clearly spent looking into this issue. The fact of the matter is we messed up. We did something that caused a crummy experience and for that I’m sorry. I’m also sorry we did an even crummier job communicating what was happening.
We provide a popular feature called “Shortcuts” that our users set up to help them quickly navigate the Internet from their address bar. These Shortcuts are often in conflict with the Google toolbar, which hijacks the address bar, or in Firefox where it is the default search spot for any non domain name typed into the address bar. Without getting into a philosophical debate about what Google does, we have the opinion that Shortcuts should work, and so should Google. We love both. To that end, we’ve been proxying certain types of requests to the http://www.google.com subdomain for almost a year now. We’re open about it, we make it clear in the DNS and in our communication. It’s never caused an issue but it’s suboptimal and we’d rather not be proxying anything at all. It goes without saying that we absolutely do not log or mine the data passing through the proxies.
Anyway… about two weeks ago we started working with some of our colleagues at Google to figure out solutions to the proxy issue. We don’t like it doing it and neither do they. Ultimately, we just want to make navigation better, just as they want to make search better. In that vein, we took some steps to redirect traffic that wasn’t related to Shortcuts to http://www.l.google.com so it bypassed our proxies. This was BETTER in terms of performance for users but it wasn’t so good in terms of user experience (the URL changed). We didn’t tell you or the rest of our users what we were doing and why we were doing it.
The redirect is now disabled while we figure out a better solution. As always, this is a learning experience and we’re reminded what an impactful service OpenDNS has become. We always try to be clear about what we’re doing and you can be sure we’ll be even more clear in the future. If you have any questions, you can email me, david at opendns dot com.