this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Imagine how you look up a website as calling someone from a phone number, but everyone can only use addresses that go like 123.45.67.89. You can always call them through there, but that would be really hard to memorize. DNS gives dynamic names to these numbers, so when you ask for google.com; they take the request before and say "oh, google.com? That links to this number, so here you go"
There is a company called WHOIS that is entirely dedicated to keep records of this name list, but not all DNS's use it fully, as an example when adblocking DNS's gets told to pull something from a site that has ads, the DNS doesnt give the number of ad services back to the browser, but gives the rest of them. As a result, you do not see the ads.