Milo,
Personally I prefer to use the OpenDNS servers
Google's are easier to remember
But yes, if you want to scrape performance, then for people in the UK OpenDNS will be marginally (6-8 milliseconds) quicker because OpenDNS have nodes in London, whilst Google traffic hops over the channel to their facility in the Netherlands.
But at 6-8 milliseconds, its not really worth loosing much sleep over, especially considering the packet shaping / contention etc. on most people's broadband will add more than that.
Code:
traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 209.85.255.78 (209.85.255.78) 0.490 ms 0.372 ms 209.85.255.76 (209.85.255.76) 0.625 ms
2 209.85.253.196 (209.85.253.196) 0.845 ms 0.727 ms 0.829 ms
3 209.85.243.33 (209.85.243.33) 6.310 ms 209.85.240.28 (209.85.240.28) 5.811 ms 5.893 ms
4 216.239.49.36 (216.239.49.36) 9.721 ms 9.710 ms 9.723 ms
5 209.85.255.118 (209.85.255.118) 17.540 ms 9.879 ms 209.85.255.126 (209.85.255.126) 15.560 ms
6 google-public-dns-a.google.com (8.8.8.8) 9.693 ms 10.382 ms 9.852 ms
-
- 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=0 ttl=58 time=9.873 ms
-
-
- traceroute to 208.67.222.222 (208.67.222.222), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 rtr1.lon.opendns.com (193.203.5.198) 0.564 ms 0.564 ms 0.578 ms
2 * * *
3 * *^C
-
- 64 bytes from 208.67.222.222: icmp_seq=0 ttl=62 time=0.407 ms