You don't trust your ISP, so you go for the one company whose entire profit model is build around ads and profiling their users, and who is known to cooperate (willingly and/or unwillingly) with the NSA in their logging programs? I'm not sure that's the right response...
Edit: I did a little research on CDN resolution back in undergrad. One of the things that was most difficult to measure, or even define, was DNS "performance."
Just because Google anycasts its DNS network does not guarantee the best performance. Running namehelp[1] on many machines I often found that the "fastest" DNS server was not in the obvious set of DNS servers that you use.
So I guess the answer to the parent's question is: yes, possibly, but it's hard to define what "fastest" even means here. I would say that jrockway's response is even incorrect in his (implied) definite assertion that it cannot degrade your experience. If you want to know, you should measure from your endpoint. There is no other way.
It told me my the fastest option for me was Dyn's servers, but those have unacceptable to me anti-spyware "safe mode" blockouts. #2 on its list was Google DNS which I was already using.
The graphs for HTTP performance said namehelp's choices were degrading my performance on average by 11ms.
Good app to add to the toolchest though. It'll be interesting to try it out when I travel.
"We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information."
What other expectations for a DNS server do you have? If you do a lookup for example.com's A record, it's going to know that someone looked up the A record for example.com.
As I mention in a related comment, if you're worried about the NSA knowing what websites you visit, you must not use TCP/IP. TCP/IP has no provision for obscuring the source and destination of packets; you have to add that at another layer.
(To wax philosophical, it seems that we're outgrowing the Internet. Nobody was worried about protecting their browsing history from their ISP or the government when the Internet was designed, so when we start talking about "if you use XXX service, the NSA can find out", that's true of pretty much everything except for things specially designed to hide browsing history from the NSA. Even those can be suspected to be compromised, meaning you shouldn't even be here commenting if you're truly worried about what information a DNS server might collect from you.)
