a-auto.ru was the address of the website of Avangard-Avto (Vanguard-Auto), a Nizhny Novgorod company that traded in cars and car parts. The firm was listed in the nn.ru rubricator, the directory of Nizhny Novgorod websites, in three automotive sections at once[2][3][4], and its site was connected to the regional counter Counter.nn.ru[2]. The earliest copy of the page in the web archive is dated 3 December 2001[1]. Later the same address was taken over by the site of another firm, a supplier of truck parts with Moscow telephone numbers[5], and the last saved snapshot, of 13 May 2024, no longer contains anything but an incoherent string of words[6].

What was on the site

Of Avangard-Avto's own website essentially a single line has survived. All that can be extracted from the snapshot of 3 December 2001 is the page title, “AVANGARD-AVTO Company”[1]; in the archived copy it is stored with a broken character encoding and can be read only by converting it back from windows-1251 to KOI8-R, an ordinary hallmark of the Russian web of those years. There is neither a menu, nor a price list, nor contact details in the saved text. In all, the web archive index holds 39 copies for this address, but three of them made it into our examination: those of 2001, 2015 and 2024; what was on the site between the first and the second cannot be reconstructed from them.

What is known about the company itself comes from its card in the nn.ru directory, which is also where the address entered this census from. The card named the owner of the site as “Avangard - Avto Company” and stated that Avangard-Avto “have for six years ensured and continue to ensure at present the sale of vehicles of OAO ‘GAZ’, OAO ‘PAZ’, AO ‘AvtoVAZ’ and of various car parts”[2]. Nothing more about the firm — no address, no telephone number, no names — is present in the available material: whether it was a showroom or a wholesale office, one shop or several, the description does not allow one to say.

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In the nn.ru rubricator the firm stood in three sections of the “Firms (Enterprises): Auto” branch at once — “Car sales”[2], “Sale of spare parts, components and accessories”[3] and “Maintenance and car service”[4] — although its card said not a word about servicing. Next to the name the directory printed the reading of the Counter.nn.ru counter, to which the site was connected under number 2906: 129 as of 23 June 2002[2][4], and 122 as of 16 August of the same year[3]. Just what this figure meant the directory did not explain; the top entries of the same sections carried values an order of magnitude larger, up to 1226[2].

The counter and its rating were regional, so the mere presence in the list is evidence that the site was regarded as part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet. Our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is built on the data of this counter, and a-auto.ru is among the sites in its census.

Another firm's site at the same address

By 1 August 2015 the address a-auto.ru was running the site of a different firm, Alyans-Avto LLC (Alliance-Auto), a supplier of spare parts for Russian-made trucks: KamAZ, KrAZ, ZIL and GAZ[5]. The page was headed accordingly, “Truck spare parts”, and the navigation listed “Home”, “Contacts”, “Catalogue”, “Products”, “Search” and an “About the company” block[5]. As the home page stated, the company offered “a wide range of spare parts” and sold them “wholesale and retail”, while “a flexible system of discounts applies for regular customers”[5].

There was nothing Nizhny Novgorod about this version of the site: the telephone numbers were given with the 495 area code — 329-66-04 and 585-48-18 — plus the mobile 8-916-196-49-52, the e-mail addresses aauto06@mail.ru and info@a-auto.ru, and in the footer “© 2005 - 2015 all rights reserved”[5]. Exactly when the address passed from the Nizhny Novgorod company to the Moscow one cannot be reconstructed from the available snapshots: our selection holds no copies between 2001 and 2015.

The Alyans-Avto site itself had long gone without updating by the time of the snapshot: the only news item in the saved text is dated 12 April 2008 and is headed “ZIL-131 cab”[5]. At the very bottom of the page, below the copyright line, stands an extraneous link to a resource that has nothing to do with car parts[5] — the characteristic trace of a spam insertion into an abandoned engine.

How it ended

The snapshot of 13 May 2024 found at a-auto.ru a page filled entirely with an unconnected list of Russian dictionary words: “notch separatism hypochondriac tithe lot colic flue…”[6]. Not a trace of the company, no contact details, no menu — by the look of it an ordinary placeholder page with dictionary junk, of the kind put up on abandoned domains. A liveness probe taken while this census was being compiled returned for the domain the answer “The domain is not linked to hosting”, its state being a parking page or an empty page.

Thus the address came full circle: a Nizhny Novgorod seller of cars and spare parts in 2001, a Moscow trader in truck parts by the mid-2010s, a junk page in 2024. All that remains of the first, Nizhny Novgorod life of a-auto.ru is a title line in an archived copy and a card in the nn.ru directory.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 3 December 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, section “Firms (Enterprises): Auto: Car sales”, 23 June 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, section “Firms (Enterprises): Auto: Sale of spare parts, components and accessories”, 16 August 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, section “Firms (Enterprises): Auto: Maintenance and car service”, 23 June 2002 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 1 August 2015 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, 13 May 2024 (archive)