Why do some URLs not have 'www.' in them?

Question

Some websites, such as answers.yahoo.com, don't have www on them. Does that mean that it isn't part of the world wide web or something?

Thanks in advance!~ :D

Answer 1

The 'www' in the URL just means that the name of the computer you are accessing is 'www'. There is no special reason an URL needs to have 'www' in it.

It's simply a convention. So if you know a company's domain is 'example.com', you can probably find their main web page by trying 'www.example.com'.

But there is no special reason the hostname has to be 'www'. The 'http' in the beginning of the URL specifies that it's a web page accessed using HTTP (one of the protocols used for the world wide web).

Answer 2

http://no-www.org/

this  might give u more details  

Answer 3

The www you see at the beginning is just a subdomain for yahoo.com the same goes for answers.yahoo.com. It allows them to have multiple web sites while still maintaining the *.yahoo.com as well as making it easy to understand what site you are being directed to.  To really understand this you have to know how DNS works. I will link you to and article on DNS and you can read up on it if you have further interest.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/dns.htm

DNS is really simple it just changes IPs to human readable addresses. example.

answers.yahoo.com = 209.73.187.220

yahoo.com = 68.180.206.184

www.yahoo.com = 69.147.76.15

These are all provided by yahoo.com but as you can see the lead to different ip addresses. If you want to try this for your self just hit(note: "type" is just there to let you know it needs to be typed in and is not part of the command omit it when you try this) windows key+r > type cmd > type ping www.yahoo.com or ping answers.yahoo.com and see what ip you get.

There is no need to have www infront of www.yahoo.com it is just a convenience for users.

Here is another article you might find interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_...

Answer 4

no,  websites dont need www. at the beginning,  of them. thats just how it is nowadays

Answer 5

the domain name is www.yahoo.com

answers is simply a subdomain of www.yahoo.com

try it out: type in www.answers.yahoo.com. you will be taken to plain old answers.yahoo.com.

just like if you only type in http://yahoo.com, you go to http://www.yahoo.com.



there is an entry in the records where (* means optional www)

*.yahoo.com = www.yahoo.com, and

*.answers.yahoo.com = answers.yahoo.com

whatever you type, you will be redirected to the proper address.