Lifehacker:
Every millisecond counts when you’re browsing the web, and if you’d like to eke a bit more speed out of your internet connection, you can change your DNS server to make those pages load a bit faster. Here’s a brief introduction to what DNS is, how it affects your connection speed, and how you can easily change your computer’s settings to use the fastest DNS possible.
After today’s outages, I thought a little primer on what DNS is might be appropriate.
I followed the link and the article recommend an app to suss out your DNS server, etc., but it was a Google app. This could be a convenient way for Google to mine data on your internet usage. I checked the App store, and found several apps that might work, but I’m still on 10.6.8 (4 gigs is not adequate for my needs to update the OS. On my MacMini, the background utils I run along with the OS use up nearly 4 gigs. I’ll just go with the DNS I’ve been using for so long, I can’t remember the article I read that caused me to change it from my ISP’s.
OpenDNS is fairly safe and trust worthy, iirc.