zemlan.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod open joint-stock company "Zemelnaya Birzha" (Land Exchange), which existed from 2002[1] to 2018[5]. The company was based in Nizhny Novgorod on Oksky Syezd[1], and over sixteen years it went from a storefront listing three plots for sale[1] to a land-surveying and site-investigation firm working across Nizhny Novgorod and the Nizhny Novgorod Region[2].

2002: an exchange with three plots

The earliest surviving snapshot of the home page is dated 20 June 2002[1]. The site was simply called "Zemelnaya Birzha" (Land Exchange) and promised "land plots of the Volga region"[1]. The owners described themselves in the style of the era: the home page stated that the company had "four years of experience in the property valuation market," belonged to the "Russian Board of Appraisers," and was a "leader of the Nizhny Novgorod appraisal market"[1].

The exchange itself amounted to a short list of three lots placed right on the home page:

  • a plot in the town of Bor — a 10-year lease right, 4,000 dollars[1];
  • a plot in Zelyony Gorod (Green Town) — 10 sotkas (0.1 ha), 5,000 dollars[1];
  • a plot in the village of Novopokrovskoye — 7.5 sotkas, 2,000 dollars[1].

Below stood the address and phone numbers: "Nizhny Novgorod [misspelled as "N. Novgrod" in the original], Oksky Syezd, 2, office 304," 39-45-08 and 34-57-25, email zemla@mts-nn.ru[1] — the typo in the city's name and the six-digit phone numbers are preserved in the snapshot as they were. The page's meta keywords listed everything it hoped to be found for in search: "land exchange," "Nizhny Novgorod and region," "land auction," "purchase and sale of land plots," "10-year lease right"[1].

2012 and 2016: land surveying instead of trading

By the snapshot of 8 May 2012, only one menu item remained from the exchange — "Land Market Offers"[2]. The main content became services: land-surveying work, engineering site investigations for construction, legal services, land valuation, and sections titled "Questions and Answers," "About the Company," and "Contacts"[2]. The company offered "a full range of work and services for formalizing land plots in the city of Nizhny Novgorod and the Nizhny Novgorod Region," gathering documents for land title, help with registering rights, and converting land from one category to another[2].

A sizable part of the home page was taken up by a list of licenses and permits: licenses VVG-01600G and VVG-01601 dated 5 July 2007 for geodesic and cartographic activity, issued by the Federal Service for Geodesy and Cartography of Russia and valid until 5 July 2012; license No. GS-4-52-02-28-0-5262105659-008230-1 dated 24 September 2007; certificate No. 0019 dated 18 March 2010 authorizing work affecting the safety of capital construction projects, issued by the self-regulatory organization (SRO) NP "Association of Engineering Surveyors in Construction"[2]. By this time the address had shifted within the same building: "Oksky Syezd, 2a, offices 621-622," phone 437-84-61, fax 437-84-27, email zemlan@sandy.ru[2].

The snapshot from 6 October 2016 shows the site already on a new engine, with navigation reading "You are here: Home" and boilerplate labels "Skip to content," "Nav view search"[3]. The text still had uncleaned traces of a paste from a text editor — lines reading "Normal 0 false false false RU X-NONE"[3]. The list of services had grown more detailed and technical: land-surveying (cadastral) work, topographic survey and engineering site investigations for construction, preparation of a site layout plan, inspection of building and structure elements, legal services, land valuation[3]. The old licenses had been replaced by certificate No. 0015.03-2010-5262105659-I-027 dated 3 December 2012 and certificate No. 0173.00-2016-5262105659-P-022 dated 4 April 2016, issued by the SRO NP "Association of Nizhny Novgorod Designers"; a separate line noted that "the company employs certified cadastral engineers"[3]. The address stayed the same, while the phone numbers changed to 411-14-61 and fax 411-14-27[3].

Throughout this time the home page carried a link titled "Disclosure of information in accordance with the regulation on information disclosure by issuers of equity securities (FSFR)"[2][3] — a section mandatory for an open joint-stock company, which looked unexpectedly official for a land-surveying office.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

In our census of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, zemlan.ru came to our attention through materials from the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day in 2004[6]. It was not a notable site: the surviving contest results record no votes for it[6], and in the Counter.nn.ru ranking its position is not recorded in our data from the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. It was a typical corporate business-card site: it existed not for traffic but as an address and a list of services, and going by the Web Archive's capture frequency — about sixty crawls of the home page over sixteen years[5] — even the crawlers rarely stopped by.

How it closed

The last snapshot where the site is still alive is dated 21 January 2018; its content is the same as in 2016, right down to the address on Oksky Syezd and the phone number 411-14-61[4]. By then the page title had shrunk to the generic "Home," and the description and keywords retained only "Land Regulation"[4]. Web Archive captures stop in May 2018[5].

A check made while preparing this census found no trace of the zemlan.ru domain: it is not registered, there is no site at the address, and no successor to the project has been found. What remains of "Zemelnaya Birzha" is what the Web Archive managed to copy: three plots — in Bor, in Zelyony Gorod, and in Novopokrovskoye — priced from two to five thousand dollars in 2002[1], and a list of SRO authorizations from 2016[3].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2012 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2018 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — List of zemlan.ru snapshots in the Web Archive (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet 2004 voting results (archive)