My suspicion is that Google employee's were seeing their dns fucked with at public wifi hotspots (something that was happening at the time) and decided to build their own dns for their own security. Being Google and having boat loads of server resources I imagine they decided they may as well make it public.
All those products that got killed mostly started that way, employee's wanted them and google had the money to make them happen. Eventually though if they're not growing, then who in google wants to work on them?
Did google also see it as a strategic way to make sure dns providers couldn't force search results elsewhere? Probably, but then as users WE certainly don't want dns providers fucking with dns in that manner either.
Close. AIUI, Google was annoyed at people meddling with DNS results, and with ISPs providing terrible DNS performance for their customers.
Google wins when the Internet is fast. Google's goals here are that you can use Websearch quickly and without hotspots etc meddling with traffic. The story is simple: If companies meddle with DNS results, or provide poor performance, then users don't use the Internet as much, and Google doesn't get to sell ads. Google wants you to have the fastest, most reliable Internet it can, because that means you don't get frustrated and go do something else. Google doesn't need to scrape the logs for whatever people think google might be scraping the logs for.
Google _does_ log some data for dealing with abuse (as you can probably imagine 8.8.8.8 gets a _lot_ of intentional and unintentional abuse), but tries to be as clear as it can be about what gets logged, what it's used for, and how long it's kept. Google treats these logs very very carefully, carefully limiting who has access, and when you need to use the logs to debug something, it's very carefully audited.
Disclaimer: I used to be one of the SREs oncall for Google Public DNS (but not any more – I now work for a different SRE team at Google).
All those products that got killed mostly started that way, employee's wanted them and google had the money to make them happen. Eventually though if they're not growing, then who in google wants to work on them?
Did google also see it as a strategic way to make sure dns providers couldn't force search results elsewhere? Probably, but then as users WE certainly don't want dns providers fucking with dns in that manner either.