score.nnov.ru was the website of SCORE, a Nizhny Novgorod consulting group active in the first half of the 2000s. The domain belonged to the nnov.ru zone; the site was registered with the Counter.nn.ru counter under number 2669 and was listed in the nn.ru directory — a catalogue of Nizhny Novgorod websites — under the category "Firms (Enterprises): Consulting, marketing services"[3]. The earliest surviving directory entry where the site already has counter readings is dated 27 May 2002[3]; the last web-archive snapshot of the home page is dated 27 September 2004[8].

What the group did

The description the firm submitted to the nn.ru directory defined its audience narrowly: the group worked "with owners and directors of market companies," and described its product as "changing the leaders and businesses of companies." The list of practice areas in the same description was strategic management, marketing strategy, finance, business processes, and personnel management[3].

The home page's title was densely packed with keywords for search engines, and this list shows what else was on offer: consulting and audit, training and seminars, business planning, taxes, sales techniques and negotiation, optimization and automation, corporate culture[1]. Two phrases in this list set the site apart from its neighbors in the category — "remote consulting" and a "consultation hotline"[1]: part of the firm's services were meant to be delivered online, not only in person.

What the site looked like

What survives of the home page in the archive is a short navigation menu. As the home page stated, visitors were offered "Our new publications" and "A dialogue with SCORE's consultants," as well as a subscription — "Subscribe to news from the SCORE consulting group"[1]. The space that corporate websites usually give to a description of services was here given over to an epigraph: an extended quotation from Lee Iacocca on the need to set a goal, get an education, and then act[1].

The snapshots from 24 May and 20 November 2003 match word for word: over half a year, not a single line on the home page changed[1][2]. Neither an address nor a phone number appears in the surviving text of the home page — any contact details, if they existed, lived on inner pages that the web archive never reached[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The counter rating is the only surviving measure of the site's traffic, and it is tracked through directory snapshots. On 27 May 2002 SCORE had a score of 21.3, and in the "Consulting, marketing services" category, sorted by rating, the site ranked third — after "Group P&P" (150.81) and the "Volga-Don" Association (40.07)[3]. On 4 June 2002 it was 25.46[4]. By 17 November 2002 the reading had risen to 69, and the site again held third place in the category, now behind the "Russian Management" portal (1595) and the same "Volga-Don" (122)[5]. In the snapshot from 14 May 2003 — 45[6].

These are modest figures: even SCORE's best result trailed the leader of its own category by more than twenty times. But third place among Nizhny Novgorod consulting sites that bothered to install a counter at all is a notable position for a narrow business niche, where the internet at the time barely mattered. How such readings fit the broader picture is discussed in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating; a general overview of the era is in the article "Nizhny Novgorod Internet."

The site does not appear in the results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[7]; no votes for it are recorded in our data.

How it closed

The surviving snapshots contain neither a farewell message nor a redirect to another address: the site simply stopped updating and disappeared. The last web-archive snapshot of the home page is dated 27 September 2004[8]; there are no later traces of the site's operation in the archive. Judging by the snapshots, the site existed at least from May 2002[3] to September 2004[8]. All that remains of it is the saved copies of the home page, a line in the directory of Nizhny Novgorod websites, and a handful of counter readings.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, category "Consulting, marketing services," 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, category "Consulting, marketing services," 2002 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, category "Consulting, marketing services," 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, category "Consulting, marketing services," 2003 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Last snapshot of the home page, 2004 (archive)