bcentre.by.ru was the site of the Bogorodsk Advertising and Information Business Center, an advertising and information site about the products of the town of Bogorodsk in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast[2]. The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated September 14, 2002[1], the last — July 28, 2005[4]. The site represented not a single enterprise but the products of an entire district center — a district commodity directory in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s.
What the site offered
The surviving text of the home page amounts to a list of product groups. "Bogorodsk Advertising and Information Business Center. Presenting the products of the town of Bogorodsk, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast: leather, glue, soap, footwear, lighting equipment, machine tools, workwear, building materials, cable, harness goods" — so read the home page in the snapshot of September 28, 2004[2]. The same text, word for word, appeared in the page's meta description in the snapshot of September 14, 2002[1] and in the snapshot of January 30, 2005[3] — across all surviving snapshots the set of product groups did not change.
The keyword list of the first version was broader than the visible text: alongside leather, glue, soap, footwear, lighting equipment, machine tools, workwear, building materials, cable, and harness goods, it also listed rolled metal, computers, office equipment and components, as well as the words "wholesale," "retail," "Nizhny Novgorod," and "Bogorodsk"[1]. The same list also included personal names — Andrei Neprel and Roman Markin — and the words Gram and Droid; what these people's relationship to the project was cannot be established from the surviving snapshots[1].
The page title grew longer over time. In the 2002 snapshot it was the short "Advertising and Information Business Center"[1], while in the September 2004 and January 2005 snapshots the entire product list was moved into the title — "Advertising and Information Business Center: leather, glue, soap, footwear, lighting equipment, machine tools, workwear, building materials, cable, harness goods"[2][3]. The keyword list, by contrast, was shortened: by January 2005 it had lost the names, the mention of Nizhny Novgorod, as well as computers, office equipment, components, and workwear[3].
The surviving text of the home page contains no postal address, no phone number, and no names of the participating enterprises: only its title, meta description, and list of product groups have come down to us[1][2][3].
Address on someone else's hosting
The project had no domain of its own: the site occupied a third-level address in the by.ru zone, on BY.RU hosting[4]. This is also what decided its fate. The hosting service had automatic archiving of abandoned sites, and by July 2005 the address bcentre.by.ru no longer served the home page but a service stub page instead: "You have requested a page of the site 'bcentre.by.ru,' which has not been updated for too long, has been deemed outdated, and has been moved to the archive"[4]. The stub page itself dated the end of work on the site: "The last edit of the site occurred 267 days ago: November 3, 2004"[4].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
The site entered our materials through the directory of the nn.ru catalog — from there the list of addresses for the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating was drawn. In the Counter.nn.ru rating data it holds neither a position nor votes: it was not part of the measured segment of the Nizhny Novgorod web.
The site's connection to Nizhny Novgorod is direct and stated by the site itself: both the home page text and the keywords name Bogorodsk and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, and the first version also names Nizhny Novgorod itself[1][2]. The site's profile was defined by the list, which opened with leather and closed with harness goods[2].
How it closed
Updates to the site stopped on November 3, 2004[4]. As late as January 2005 the home page still opened normally[3], but by the end of July of that year the hosting service had folded it into the archive[4]. The last snapshot in the web archive is dated July 28, 2005, and contains only this stub page[4]; in total, about two dozen records for this address were captured in the web archive over 2002–2005. As checked in 2026, the address now serves a page titled "This domain may be for sale" — nothing remains of the catalog of Bogorodsk products except the archived snapshots of its home page.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, January 2005 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, July 2005 (archive)