Every website used to be like “www.example.com”. Now I rarely encounter this “www.”. Why did it even exist and where has it gone? I also used to run into websites with legitimate domains, but “ww1.” instead of “www.”, these were probably phishing sites, but how did this actually work on top of legitimate domains?
It’s been “hidden” since Chrome v95 or something. Also, many companies might just host their web service on their main domain name.
Also, hit Ctrl+Enter in any browser and it’ll tack that right on it and goto the webpage or hit a redirect or 5…whatever their architect setup.
google.com may be a CNAME to www.google.com (for example).
The www (or whatever hostname) is just to balance the web traffic from the other Internet services, like SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP, etc.