Fair point, but remember that this convention predates modern search engines. I'm sure you remember what the Internet was like in 1995, for example, and how difficult it could be to find precisely what you were looking for. That's the world Java and its package convention was born into, and in that world it made more sense for the reason you pointed out.

That said, at least Sun was smart enough to not package core classes as com.sun.* - they reserved the java.* packaging for core language constructs, so at least that's not broken.