Last piece of the internet jigsaw

There's one thing i don't understand about the internet and i was wondering if someone could explain.
What is the internet's DNS server?
When i type in an URL, where is it checked for the ip address of that URL? When i say try to access www.google.com, does internet explorer send a request to the ultimate server of the internet to find out the IP adddress of google?
Or where does it get it from?

It uses the DNS server specified in your IE settings...

If you don't have a DNS entry you won't be able to resolve any domain names...

Ya, the DNS network is a distributed database that's spread out across the planet.

Usually your ISP has a database that points to other databases that point to other databases that points to other databases, etc. etc. etc.

And in return, those databases point to more databases and more databases.

Oh man, a long night....

NEWS FLASH:

Ultimate Internet Server switches from Apache to IIS, falls to Code Red and Nimda attacks within 13 seconds! Millions of geeks without anything to do forced to face real world and light of day for first time in 20 years!

Millions of computer geeks (hermitus anti-societus) have taken to the streets in a massive exodus like none the world has ever known. Some have purportedly attempted to interact with human beings and have been met with fierce resistance. One report, though unconfirmed as of the time of this writing, even claims that one geek attempted to interface with a real, live woman. When asked what the experience was like, the befuddled geek responded: "How do I undo? I need to try something else! I need to C-_ dammit!". Others, upon seeing the real world for the first time exclaimed "My god! This is worse than VMS!".

In other news, Microsoft launched it's crack team of computer thought police to rough up and disable any computer users of non-Microsoft systems. Check page 2 for more information and to find out where you can get your Bill "the Golden God" Gates idols.
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I just noticed that when I'm running KDE, my little shrunken window things that hold consoles have little emoticons on them:

[shattoc@localhost:~]

Here's the quick and dirty of DNS. You machine makes a request to view www.google.com and sends the request to your local DNS server. It isn't the zone master for google.com so sends it to one of the root DNS servers that is the master for the .com zone. The .com DNS server looks up in its table and finds out who's the master for the google.com zone. It then sends the request to the server that it the master for the google.com zone. The google.com zone master then looks up in its table and finds out which ip address is associated with the www machine in its zone and sends the request to that machine (www.google.com). The www.google.com machine then responds to the request.