alyans7.r52.ru was the website of Alyans-7 LLC, a Nizhny Novgorod limited liability company that traded in rolled metal products. The address sat in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru, and, judging by the signature at the bottom of the page, that is also where the hosting was located[1]. The copyright notice on the home page had read 2001 since the earliest capture[1]; the surviving snapshots span 2003–2010[1][3]. The company stated its geography directly in the home page text: as the home page put it, it listed "N.Novgorod, Nizhny, Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod, NN, N.Novgorod, Novgorod, Nizhny Novgorod Region"[1].
What the home page looked like
The entire text preserved from the site fits into a few lines. At the top stood a heading rendered in "pseudo-graphics" made of hyphens, equals signs and angle brackets: "--==Alyans-7 LLC - Sale of all types of rolled metal==--," as the home page put it[1]. Below it ran a long line of keywords — geographic and product-related — and under that a signature: "© 2001 Alyans-7 LLC," "Coding by Info-online," "Hosting by r52.ru"[1].
Keywords placed directly into the page's visible text are a characteristic mark of early-era promotion: the page described itself for search engines using the very words by which it hoped to be found. The preserved text of the home page contains no postal address, no telephone number with the area code 831 or 8312, no price list, and no visitor counters[1]; what existed beyond this page cannot be established from the archived snapshots.
By the December 2, 2004 capture the page had grown even shorter: the heading and the line of keywords stayed the same, but the signature was reduced to "© Alyans-7 LLC" — without the year and without any mention of the developer or the hosting provider[2]. The 2003 snapshot was taken at alyans7.r52.ru[1], the 2004 snapshot at the address with the www prefix[2].
What the company traded in
The product range can only be reconstructed from that same line of keywords — no other list of goods has survived in the archived snapshots. It names rolled metal (in two spellings, "metalprokat" and "metalloprokat"), stainless steel and "nerzhaveyushchiiy" — with a typo — nichrome, wire, flange and flanges, pipes, including "kappilyarnaya" [capillary], round bar, electrodes, sheet metal, rolled stock, galvanized steel, high-speed steel, tool steel, mesh[1]. This is the vocabulary of a supply outfit working off a warehouse: not a plant's product line, but the set of items most often asked for. The company's general self-description was placed in the heading — "Sale of all types of rolled metal"[1].
Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
Alyans-7 belongs to that layer of the Nizhny Novgorod internet which did not compete for traffic and did not take part in the network's public life. In the published results table of the vote that closed out the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day in 2004, the site does not appear[4]. It likewise does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru ranking that we hold, so nothing can be said about the site's traffic; the archive did not capture a counter on the home page itself[1]. For more on how our sample is built and what can be seen from it, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.
Sites like this made up the background of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet: a business "calling card" on local hosting, built by an outside contractor — named on the page as "Coding by Info-online"[1]. There is no news and no update dates in the preserved text of the home page[1]: the only thing the page communicated to the outside world was that the company existed and what it did.
How it closed
The last snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated June 26, 2010[3]. As of this article's writing, the address alyans7.r52.ru does not respond: the domain no longer exists. There are no reports of a closure, a move, or a change of address in the snapshots available to us, and between 2003 and 2004 the page barely changed[1][2] — the site simply ceased to exist along with its address.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2010 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet voting results, 2004 (archive)