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.