urls

[cyberstar]

why in some computers you have to enter the 3w to access a site and on other you don't need to ???

[vehelpfulguy]

In the early days of the internet (before browsers even) you had to put the full address of any internet site bacause it may not be a WWW site (there are other letters you can put in place of WWW like FTP for example). 

When browsers came out, you still had to put the full address, like www.microsoft.com.

But gradually, because browsers generally only work with WWW sites the letters WWW became somewhat redundant. 

I believe (but have no proof) that the WWW can be left off all sites and they will still work, in Internet Explorer anyway. 

Not sure about other browsers like opera or mozilla.  

[wideboy]

Try holding down the CTRL key when you press ENTER with the web address and no http://www at all. eg. just google.com

[OBonio]

What you type into a browser is merely what is known as a hostname. These get resolved to IP addresses by way of DNS (Domain Name Server). You have TLDs (Top Level Domains) like .com, .co.uk, .net, .biz etc. Preceding this is the domain (like answerbank). Anything preceding this is optional but generally recommended to distinguish between different types of servers (web, ftp, mail etc). Nowadays, most domain/TLD combinations will resolve to the IP address of the respective web site. It depends how their DNS is setup though.

To test IP resolving, you can use nslookup from the command line. Try just the domain/TLD then the www prefix and see if they return different IPs (this can get boring after 2 domains!).

[fo3nix]

if you have control over your site, you can set it to allow no www or force www. not all websites are the same. i'm of the opinion that both should work equally well. www is old hat now really, quite redundant.

http://no-www.org/

[cyberstar]

So why does my pc allow you just to type dixons or whatever you are looking for but on my laptop i can only search using the url when i type the fulll address ????

Is there some setting i can change ???