A parte www
de um URL tem um histórico por trás disso. Extraído de Wikipedia ,
Many domain names used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. The hostname for a web server is often www, in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server. These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of 'www' as a subdomain name is not required by any technical or policy standard; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch,[27] and many web sites exist without it. Many established websites still use 'www', or they invent other subdomain names such as 'www2', 'secure', etc. Many such web servers are set up such that both the domain root (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites.
Dito isso, a inclusão do subdomínio www
é habitual na maior parte do tempo e www.google.com
e google.com
são duas URLs totalmente diferentes, mesmo que apontem para o mesmo endereço IP após uma resolução de DNS.