Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

Why is it www.google.com instead of com.google.www? Tried searching for a good explanation but found nothing helpful. Is there any solid reasons for the arrangement, or is it just a random choice?

[EDIT]: as bajsejohannes points out, the major problem of the current arrangement is that it differs from the order of the path component, as in

    www.google.com/path/to/the/file

it really makes more sense to say

    com.google.www/path/to/the/file

This is widely considered to be a mistake.

In China, addresses do work that way. Word order of addresses is a language-specific rule that varies by language.

Bad analogy:

email:

   georgex@somedomain.sometld

www:

   http://somedomain.sometld/~georgex/

real life:

   George Xandros 
   553 Sunset Blvd
   12322 San Jose
   USA

So, the web is mixed up, and the other two are 'backwards'. None of them get it in the most logical way.

Same with dates:

   2002.10.09

vs

   09.10.2002

or

   10.09.2002

It's all about conventions, what we're used to, so to say 'the same reason' is calling upon a reason that you don't state, when if you thought about it long enough would boil down to 'that's how we've always done it'.

But that doesn't really answer the question.

The most 'logical' order is to put the larger units up front, and smaller ones towards the end.

But since we are where we are that isn't going to change 'for the same reason' (too much investment) that England isn't going to switch to driving on the 'right' side of the road.

Once a convention is established even if there is a marginally better one the cost of switching usually outweighs the advantage of the switch, not to mention a whole bunch of messy stuff during the transition.

That you've been 'able to deal with it' is simply because that's what you are used to, but that does not mean that that is better or worse, simply a way of life.

Anyway, anything I search for with 'order' and 'domainname' wants to sell me domains, so no citations, but the basic complaint was that it breaks the sequence of a url, where the 'highest' entity should be on the left, and the smallest entity on the right.

So, iirc, the optimimum would have been something like:

http/com/ibm/www/80/somepath/somefile

That wasn't it exactly, but it gives the general idea.

The DNS was long established by the time URLS rolled around so I doubt anything could have been done about it anyway.

If the phishing troubles resulting from the DNS order would have been foreseen I'm pretty sure that they would have picked the 'other' way.

edit:

found something about all this after some digging:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/754114.html

http://bandb.blogspot.com/2009/01/are-domain-name-backwards....

Since the DNS is a hierarchical system, the 'root' of the hierarchy should have been at the beginning, just like in unix you don't start with the name of the file but with the 'root'.

Anyway, the quote I'm looking for is by none other than Tim Berners-Lee, I think it may have been in his book though, not online.