cheburashka.r52.ru was the site of a Nizhny Novgorod wholesale firm called "Cheburashka," which traded in toys, costume jewelry, music boxes, and haberdashery[1]. It ran in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru: the copyright notice on the home page was dated 2000[1], and all surviving snapshots date from 2001. The Nizhny Novgorod tie is stated in the page text itself — the firm promised, as the home page put it, "the widest range of this product line in Nizhny Novgorod at the lowest prices"[1]. By December 2001 that address was serving not the firm's page but a service stub of the R52 portal[4].

One page instead of a site

The surviving snapshots show a site the size of a single screen. At the top ran a navigation line "CHEBURASHKA | about us," and the "about us" section was the only item on it[1]. What followed was an appeal to wholesale buyers spanning a few paragraphs — the archive recorded no catalog, no product images, and no order form on this domain.

The firm presented itself as a long-standing market player: "We have been working in the wholesale toy market for over 5 years," the home page stated[1], meaning trading began well before the firm went online. The price list, according to the page, contained more than 2,000 items of domestic and imported toys[1]. Customers were promised fast service in the showroom, qualified guidance on the assortment for novice entrepreneurs, exchange of defective goods, and delivery of orders around the city[1]. The appeal closed with an invitation to visit the firm's warehouses[1].

Neither a warehouse address, nor a phone number, nor a price list as a separate file appears on the surviving page: buyers were invited to come by without being told where. At the bottom stood the copyright holder's line "©2000 firm 'Cheburashka'" and a credit line for the maker — "Web design by Teamoty Brane Inc."[1] No visitor counters or banners are visible in the preserved page text.

Beyond the text itself, the range of goods is sketched by a set of keywords in the page's service section: "toy, wholesale, Nizhny Novgorod, costume jewelry, haberdashery, soft toy, toy weapons, jewelry, doll, games, construction set"[1]. It also shows who the search targeting was aimed at: the word "wholesale" comes second, next to the city name.

A site that never changed

Between March 30 and September 28, 2001, the Web Archive captured the home page three times[1][2][3], and all three times the text matches word for word, right down to the 2000 copyright. Over half a year, not a word on the site changed, even though the page claimed the firm was constantly expanding and updating its assortment[1]. Such immobility is typical of a web business card made once, to order, by an outside contractor.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site made it into the census through the nn.ru directory listing, where the entry repeated verbatim the home page's opening line — about toys for children of all ages, costume jewelry, and music boxes[1]. The domain does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter; no votes for it are recorded in our data. It is not listed in the results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day for 2004[5] — by then it had already been gone for nearly three years. The layer of such corporate business-card sites is examined in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating; the domain itself belongs to the early stratum of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, from before the era of city contests and awards.

How it closed

The last snapshot showing the firm's content is dated September 28, 2001[3]. Already by December 4 of that same year, the same address was serving a stub headed "R52 - work in progress" with the text: "We apologize, our site is currently under construction. Please come back later!" — with a link "Return to the R52 portal"[4]. This snapshot ends the domain's archive: the last Web Archive snapshot is dated December 4, 2001[4], and it does not record the promised return.

Today the domain cheburashka.r52.ru no longer exists, and no move to another address is noted in our data. What became of the "Cheburashka" firm itself after 2001 cannot be traced from the surviving material: it left behind four pages in the Web Archive and one line in a directory.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (March 30) (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (May 19) (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (September 28) (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Stub in place of the site, 2001 (December 4) (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)