www1 is a prefix used on the internet to create mirror websites and is often used while the original server is being updated or modified. This is not necessary for websites that do not experience vitally important traffic such as government websites and high traffic search engines. Also this can be used to divide traffic from different geographic regions. www2 and www3 are also commonly used in much the same matter, in supplement of the more traditional www. In fact this prefix is simply a hostname that could be changed to anything.
Problems
The use of such mirrored websites can cause a drop in importance of a website for large search engines to reduce duplicate results for their users.
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