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.

In Firefox, if you type in any text in the address bar which is not a valid URL, it defaults to a search for that text on Google. Even better, it defaults to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search on Google. So if there is one particular page which seems to fit the search very well, you are directly taken to it instead of being shown the search results. If no such page exists, regular Google search results are shown. I have noted that not many people use this very useful feature, not even the highly technical inclined. So I thought it would be a good idea to record this here.

Here are some examples of good navigational queries (type in Firefox address bar, without the quotes):

“imdb the godfather” or even just “the godfather”!

“wikipedia grok” or “wiki grok” or even just “grok”!

“bob dylan last.fm”

“lyrics stairway to heaven”

If you feel that “I’m Feeling Lucky” is too aggressive, you might want to switch to Google’s “Browse By Name” or even the regular Google search from the Firefox address bar. This page explains the how.