Hello,

When i do traceroute google.com i get 20 hops to google. Is this normal? because i thought it was a bit excessive. This pc has a direct connection to my adsl modem/router.

I get 16 hops, 20 sounds about right. The first 10 hops for me are all going around/getting out of my ISP, google.net is hit at hop 12 and so the rest are getting google.

Look at the responses to your traceroute to see what's going on.

once your pass your data packets to your ISP you have no possible means of influcencing where your packets go... it's kind of futile asking if it's "right" or not as nothigns going to change... if you get there then that's good enough. each hop adds minimal delays to the connections, and you may just be finding that the routing metrics your data is being subjected to is actually taking a quicker route time wise than you might otherwise experience. would you rather your data went 50 hops on an international terrabit backbone or a couple hops on a 9600bps baud line?

Don't let the number of hops influence your opinion... it's possible that you could just see a couple of hops, but in fact your data is being pushed through a tunnel which could actually be routed through a dozen extra machines... pointless thing to do, but many isp's think it makes them look good to the techy end customers...