I have a feeling [Kottke’s analysis][kottke] is pretty spot-on: every tenth of a second longer a site takes to load, Google is losing revenue from ads. That might seem nuts to you or I, but Google isn’t exactly in the same ballpark, scale-wise, the stuff you and I work on:
>Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
For the Google behemoth .5 seconds is a _serious_ problem, and with [Google DNS][dns] they’re trying to whittle that down as much as possible. Do I trust them? Not really. Do I need to? Not really. I can change my DNS whenever I want, and so can you, and Google’s DNS privacy policy seems, [as Gruber put it][gruber], utterly reasonable.
[kottke]: http://kottke.org/09/12/google-dns “Kottke on Google DNS”
[dns]: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-public-dns.html “Google DNS”
[gruber]: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/12/04/kottke-dns “Gruber in Google DNS”