Thank you so much for posting this. I had the same problem and could not figure out what was going on for the life of me.

@Ricardo: Well, the easiest way is to use dig I guess:

dig google.com
dig google.com @208.67.222.222

The first line will look up google.com using your current dns server. The second one will use the OpenDNS server. Look for Query Time near the end of the output.

I’m at work right now, and we are using the default DNS servers from Comcast and OpenDNS consistently gives me times around 10 msec. The default servers were a scattershot – I got 113 msec, 57 msec, then 2 msec couple of times and then it jumped into 40’s again. I believe this is due local caching (probably on the domain controller) or something like that. Overall it seems that OpenDNS is faster. Then again it may depend where you are.

Oh, and I have no clue how to measure it on windows.

@Matt`: Or, switch to OpenDNS, register and disable that feature. Problem solved!

The way they do this, is by hijacking invalid domain lookups – if you switch to a different DNS server, you should be fine.

Hey Luke,

How can you tell how fast your DNS server is resolving an address and how reliable it is? Should I consider switching also?

Thanks!

Those search/redirect pages annoy the piss out of me – my current ISP does the same thing if you type in something that isn’t a proper URL (but not consistently… only some of the time)

So then when I type in a domain name without the http://www. or any TLD, expecting Firerfox to automatically take me to the page I wanted (in that lovely way it has of doing that) I instead get some scum-sucking search page that never lists the page I was aiming for.

Need to change ISP some time soon… this one is kinda sucking a lot.