Google’s expanding its grasp on the Internet with a newly revealed DNS resolving service. Google Public DNS, announced Thursday on Google’s blog, will offer you an alternative way to connect to Web sites.

The DNS is a crucial part of the Internet. It converts the text addresses people can remember into the numeric Internet Protocol addresses actually used to locate information on the Interne

“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,” said product manager Prem Ramaswami in a blog post introducing the Google Public DNS service.

Google’s search service already has made it central to the workings of the Internet. If its DNS service becomes popular, Google could become even more significant.

The advantage of using a system such as Google’s is that it can be faster, more efficient, and more secure than the default ISP alternatives. Companies such as OpenDNS already offer such functionality. As OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch points out, Google Public DNS will not offer the ability to filter content and customize the experience in the same way that a pay-to-play service does.

Google genuinely wants to make the Web a richer, more dynamic place where people spend more time, and speed is a part of that. When Web sites respond quickly, people use them more, and when people use the Web more, they search on Google more and see Google search ads more.

Google Public DNS, of course, fits into the faster-Web story. Unlike many other Google projects to improve the Web–the Android operating system for mobile activities, Chrome browser, and Chrome OS operating system, for example–Google didn’t release make its DNS software open-source.

So does that mean it fits more in the proprietary part of Google operations, like Gmail or the search algorithm?

Probably not. Google released detailed information on its DNS system’s performance methods and security design even if it didn’t release the code itself.

“By sharing, we hope that ISPs and other open [DNS] resolvers will implement it themselves,” Ramaswami said. “We’ve shared the pseudo code–the design documents,” he said. It’s not releasing the source code itself because it’s “tied very deeply into the Google infrastructure.”