Garant (garant.r52.ru)

garant.r52.ru was the site of the Garant Techno-Trade Center, a wholesale trading company in radio equipment and household appliances^[1]. The surviving page names neither a city nor a postal address; what ties the site to the Nizhny Novgorod internet is its third-level domain in the r52.ru zone and a line in the rubricator of the nn.ru catalog, from which our sample was drawn. That same location is where the site was apparently hosted, judging by the service-line signature at the bottom of the page — "Hosting by r52.ru"^[1]. The rights holder is listed as the sole proprietorship of D. V. Eliseyev^[1]. The center itself, as its home page stated, was founded in 1986 by people who had already been doing warranty repair of television sets^[1]. The home-page texts in our sample span 2003–2006^[1][3]. In the nn.ru catalog the site is described in a single line: wholesale sale of radio equipment and household appliances, and related goods.

A one-page site

Our sample includes three text snapshots — August 2003, September 2004, and August 2006 — and all three show the same "About the Company" page. Over three years its text did not change by a single word^[1][2][3]. The page title read "Techno-Trade Center GARANT / About the Company"; no other sections of the site appear in the sample^[1].

The surviving page has no contact information at all: no postal address, no telephone number, no email address^[1]. The only indication of ownership is the surname in the copyright line^[1].

Only the service-line signature at the very bottom changed. In 2003 the text was followed by three lines: the copyright "© 2001 Sole Proprietor Eliseyev D.V.", the line "Coding by Info-Online," and "Hosting by r52.ru"^[1]. By September 2004 the last two lines had disappeared, leaving only the copyright^[2], and by August 2006 the year had dropped out of it too: "© Sole Proprietor Eliseyev D.V."^[3]. Our snapshots tell us nothing more about the life of the site.

What the center did

As the home page stated, its core business was the wholesale sale of radio equipment, household appliances, and related goods; the center took on warranty and post-warranty repair of all the products it supplied and stressed that it held a license for these services^[1]. Repair of Soviet-made "Gorizont" and "Vityaz" television sets was called out as a separate line of business^[1].

The text opened with a recollection of the days when buying a television set was an event, and its breaking down a misfortune, and explained the origin of the name: "Garant" (meaning "guarantor") had been chosen, as the home page put it, "not only as a symbol of the past, but also as a guarantee of the future"^[1]. On its market standing, the company wrote that it had been operating for more than 15 years and confidently ranked among the top three — its own assessment, unconfirmed by anything in the materials available to us^[1].

The page was not addressed to the retail buyer: it invited cooperation from buyers interested in growing their own business, and from manufacturers of household appliances and radio equipment^[1]. The surviving text contains neither a price list nor a list of the equipment brands supplied.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In its makeup, garant.r52.ru is a corporate calling card of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s: a single page, put up once and left unchanged for three years^[1][2][3]. The site occupied a third level in the r52.ru zone, and the service-line signature from 2003 names that same r52.ru as the host^[1].

This address does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating: neither a position nor a visitor count is recorded in our data — it entered the census from the nn.ru catalog's rubricator, where it is listed with zero rating and zero votes; see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. The domain garant.r52.ru is also absent from the final vote tally of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day: what appears there is only a similarly-sounding address in a different domain zone, cmiki.garant.ru, which has no connection to the techno-trade center^[4]. No traces of the center's participation in these Nizhny Novgorod showcases have survived in the materials available to us.

How it closed

The surviving materials give no exact closing date, and none of the snapshots available to us carries a farewell notice. The last text snapshot of the home page is dated 13 August 2006: the text is the same as three years earlier, with only the copyright line changed^[3]. In total, the web archive holds 28 captures at this address, the first from 29 October 2001.

By the time this census was compiled, the domain garant.r52.ru was not responding and is not being served on the network. Whether the site moved to another address, and whether the enterprise itself still exists, the materials available to us do not say. What remains of the Garant Techno-Trade Center are archived snapshots of a single page, a line in the nn.ru catalog, and the owner's surname in a copyright line.