www1,2,3

why

[zechariah]

why are they www1,www2...3 & is it only for unix servers possible.why also when i key in like google in the IE address bar & then press enter with no .com or whatsoever a particular site come out instead - how do this website that come out manage to do so their tricks?

[evinrude]

To answer the first question (why www1, www2, www3).

A lot of sites have multiple servers in order to provide redundancy and/or to work as a loadsharing cluster. One of my sites, as an example, uses two servers: www1 & www2 in order to provide a safe, redundant system in case one server goes down. We don't get enough hits to really worry about load balancing, but we throw that in just 'cause it makes sense.

On huge sites (think Ebay, Amazon, etc...) the number of actual servers can be quite astonishing. :)

As for the second question, typing in a word in the address bar.... I think in IE some are pretty much set up. Google, for example, gets me www.google.com but I can't bring up my coorporate page that way. In Netscape, if I recall correctly, a single word gets www. and .com tacked on by default.

[click watcher]

if you type a word into the address bar of ie and hit return it will automatically default to search MSN for that word, so you will get the MSN results page for that word,

in the case of google it is a realnames keyword (eg they've paid for the service), which means it will go straight to google.com

go to the msn results page for google to see what i mean.

[auto.search.msn.com ]

[DaveAtIFG]

Apologies for the edits in the previous post. Took me a while to remember how to break up a long URL (which can cause side to side scrolling.)

If memory serves, typing a non-URL word into the Netscape location bar triggers Netscape's search which can be set to use any of several SEs. The default engine seems to be GoTo currently.

[zechariah]

thanks guys appreciate a lot- but for the keyword stuff-i.e. - it depends on which country you are in-like i'm in singapore when i type like furniture or even google it took me to a web hosting company locally in singapore- do you all think it has to do with the setup of the country's isp?

[Brett_Tabke]

It has to do with isp's nameserver and how it's configured. My "www" takes me to my isp's home page.

Back to the other question:

>why are they www1,www2

Just to make sure you understand:

.com is a top level domain.
domain.com is the registered domain name.

Those two parts are resolved via the dns system to point at some webserver on the net. After that, the third level domain name segment can be anything:

www.domain.com - the www. is resolved at the webserver's domain. It is part of their local dns, so it can be anything.