What’s the use of www. and. com in websites? As an extension of the question, why do emails have. Com too?
In: Technology
Ok, so we need a way of identifying places on the Internet. What we did originally, before the Internet was the Internet, was basically just had a list of all the places. That quickly became infeasible so instead they came up with a method that basically organized everything into a hierarchical structure, kind of like a tree.
At the base of the tree you have a single root, which then has multiple branches, and those branches have branches, and so on, until you get to the leaves.
[www.google.com](https://www.google.com) for example, is a leaf on this tree. Specifically the “www” is a leaf on the “google” branch which is a branch on the “com” root.
Now, the whole point of all of this is for your computer to be able to take a URL like “[www.google.com](https://www.google.com)” and convert it into an IP address because it is the actual IP address that computers need to talk. But, as we said, we can’t just have a big ol’ directory. There is just too much stuff and it’s too dynamic.
Instead, we exploit the hierarchical nature of the tree. We go to the “.com” tree and ask it, “Who is responsible for holding all of the information of the ‘google’ branch?” And it tells us. Then we go to that place and ask it “Ok, who is responsible for holding all of the information of the ‘www’ leaf?” And it tells us, and we go to that place and ask it “Ok, give me the IP information for ‘[www.google.com](https://www.google.com)'” And it tells you, and then your computer can communicate with it.
And it’s basically the same process for e-mails as well, except they’re specifically asking for the e-mail server that handles e-mails for “[google.com](https://google.com)” for which the end answer is the IP address of that e-mail server.
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