OpenDNS is a free alternative to the DNS resolution service that your ISP provides you.
Update: OpenDNS has recently added an option to turn off the “ugly” proxying I describe below. See David Ulevitch’s comment below.
The Good:
OpenDNS is fast and reliable, more than the service offered by any ISP I have used. In addition, it offers a host of other features: Content Filtering, Phishing Protection, Domain Blocking, Adult Site Blocking, Web Proxy Blocking, Domain Whitelisting, Statistics, Typo Correction, Web Shortcuts.
I have been using OpenDNS for well over an year now although I hardly use any of the advanced features they offer. It’s worked out quite well.
The Bad:
When you type in a domain that does not exist, OpenDNS resolves it to it’s own servers and shows search results (powered by Yahoo!) that they hope will help you find the site you were looking for. This is how they make money.
Now, from a DNS perspective, a bare word is a domain that does not exist. So when you use the Firefox address bar to navigate using Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky, it is treated as a DNS lookup for a non-existent domain and instead of getting lucky, you end up on the OpenDNS SERP. For someone like me, who depends on his Google luck for regular browsing, this can be quite an annoyance. Worse, this is one of the few features in OpenDNS that cannot be turned off.
But just when I thought I had to give a pass to OpenDNS, I found a very simple way to get rid of this annoyance: in Firefox’s config (type about:config in the address bar), modify the keyword.URL property in any way (say, remove ie=UTF-8& from it.) That’s all, you will once again start getting lucky!
The Ugly:
When I discovered that changing Firefox’s keyword.URL property fixes the above bad, it got me wondering: how come?
A little investigation turned threw some light: OpenDNS resolves www.google.com to its own servers and transparently proxies through all the requests to it, except — you guessed it — the Firefox address bar searches!
Now this is ugly, to say the least. A little Googling found a blog post from OpenDNS in which they provide an excuse for doing this: Dell makes a special Google-Dell page as the default search engine on all the comupters it sells; the OpenDNS folks feel that this page has too many ads and they do not like it; so they decided to fix it. Although I do not condone Dell’s policy, I do not believe what OpenDNS is doing is right.
OpenDNS is not my DNS resolver any more. It was good while it lasted. If you do not have any qualms about OpenDNS hijacking the Google searches, go ahead an use this it.
9 Comments
Comprehensive review. I was thinking of using OpenDNS at home but I don’t like the idea of losing the Firefox address bar to navigate. Also privacy could be an issue for some, with OpenDNS collecting stats for all hosts you resolve.
“But just when I thought I had to give a pass to OpenDNS, I found a very simple way to get rid of this annoyance: in Firefox’s config (type about:config in the address bar), modify the keyword.URL property in any way (say, remove ie=UTF-8& from it.) That’s all, you will once again start getting lucky!”
Well, I tried this and really broke my browser. Now I get a google page that can’t find anything because it’s looking for the whole string…
The page – http://www.google.com/search=searchword – does not exist.
No thanks for that….
Hi Chris,
I think you did a little more than what I suggested. I suggested that you remove ie=UTF-8& from the URL, which would change
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
to
http://www.google.com/search?&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
and not
http://www.google.com/search=
to which you seem to have changed it to.
You can easily fix the problem by going back to about:config, finding keyword.url, right clicking it and selecting “Reset” from the menu.
Hope this helps.
Thanks a lot, worked a treat. I was wondering what was causing these really down-beat, irrelevant pages to come up on top of google search. I deleted ie=UTF-8 without any problems.
Actually guys — you can turn it off. Just log in to your account and in the settings tab of your network under “Advanced Settings” just disable the OpenDNS proxy. Done and done.
Not ugly at all. Please update your post accordingly.
Cheers man, this OpenDNS was pissing me off to no end, I love being able to just type in a word and get my browser to do everything else, and firefox just felt broken without that feature.
Thanks again
What OpenDNS is doing is BS. They’re trying to block Google searches for their own selfish ends.
I did not change anything in my DNS and it is always set to automatic. I didn’t know that how come they change my DNS server to their own server! I do not want to use OPENDNS.
i fixed it by myself.. i went to modem config and removed those OPENDNS IPs.. you can check that as well in DNS server.