What's the difference between all the different dns stuff, unbound, local dns, adguard dns/nextdns, google, cloudflare

What's the difference between a local dns server, unbound, remote ones like google's 8.8.8.8, & cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, adguard dns/nextdns, & so on, wouldn't a local dns server still need to get it's updates from a remote one like google's or cloudflare's? & is unbound a local dns server or something else, just a cache or something?

Pi-hole by itself is not a recursive DNS resolver - it cannot find the IP for a public domain name. So, it needs to forward unblocked DNS queries to a recursive DNS server that has the ability to get the IP from the authoritative nameservers.

Google, Cloudflare, Quad9, etc are all public recursive DNS resolvers.

Unbound is a private recursive DNS resolver. It can do what Google and the others do, but it is running locally on your LAN (on the Pi-hole host platform in most setups). The only client for your local unbound instance is typically Pi-hole.

If you run unbound, you no longer need to use the public recursive resolvers.

Here is our guide for unbound, which contains a good explanation of how it works:

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/

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