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Japan’s top Internet portal Yahoo! Japan on Tuesday announced a search alliance with Google, in a deal that would see both giants dominate the Japanese market in a possible blow to Microsoft.

Yahoo! Japan will switch to Google’s search engine this year from the Yahoo! Inc. technology currently used and deploy Google’s online advertising and distribution system, while maintaining its current user interface. Read more »

Google has enhanced a line of free services available to wide public. A public DNS resolver is an attempt to speed up web browsing for the masses.

According to company engineer Prem Ramaswami, the average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups every single day – with complex pages often requiring many DNS resolutions before loading.

“Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users. So, over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable,” explained Ramaswami.

“Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web.

“You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another.”

Ramaswami added that Google was going to “share” what it found out about optimizing DNS lookups with the broader web community and other providers.

“The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone.”