this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Kinda like the contacts app on your phone. You search for a person by name and it gives you their phone number.
Web address are like a contact name. They partly exist to make it easier for humans to remember them. Computers don't use the contact name to get a website, they need the phone number (known as an 'IP address').
When you go to pornhub.com in your browser, the computer sends that address - or contact name - to a DNS server. The server looks through its records for that contact name (web address) and replies with the contact's phone number (IP address). Your browser then uses that to fetch the website for you, and you get to spank it to clown porn.