"Medservis" (medservis.nn.ru) was the website of Medservis LLC, a Nizhny Novgorod company that sold medical equipment, refrigeration and laundry equipment, and medical, school, and office furniture. As the home page stated, "the company was founded in 1992"[1]. The Nizhny Novgorod tie was stated right in the site's footer: "OOO 'MEDSERVIS' N. Novgorod, Kazanskoye Shosse, 16, bldg. 1," four city phone numbers — 257-78-55, 257-78-00, 296-29-00, and 257-78-26 — and the mailbox medservis@nn.ru in the local domain zone[1]. The site lived in the nn.ru zone and entered our census of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet through the Nizhny Novgorod site directory on nn.ru.
What the site looked like
The surviving snapshot shows an extremely spare storefront. The top menu had four items: "About the company," "Products," "Price list," "Details"[1]. The price list was divided into nine sections, which show what the company dealt in: "Medical equipment," "Medical furniture," "Refrigeration equipment," "Laundry equipment," "Disinfectants," "School furniture," "Catering equipment," "Teaching aids and equipment," "Sports equipment"[1].
The company's own description fit into two sentences. As the home page stated, "the company's core business is the sale of medical equipment, refrigeration and laundry equipment," as well as "medical, school, and office furniture, and much more"[1]. Below, the same range was repeated in two short columns — "Equipment: medical, refrigeration, laundry" and "Furniture: medical, school, office"[1].
The saved text contains no news, order form, or prices: the site worked as an electronic business card with a table of product groups and company details. The technical side is also telling — the 2017 snapshot preserved the page in KOI8-R encoding, characteristic of the Russian internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s[1].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
In the Nizhny Novgorod site directory on nn.ru, the company was listed under two headings at once — "Companies (Enterprises) → Medicine → Medical equipment and medical goods" and "Companies (Enterprises) → Equipment — manufacture, sale, installation, service → Kitchen and refrigeration" — with the same one-line description in both: "Equipment for hospitals and schools." That is how these directory pages look in our sample of archived copies.
The same pages show how modest the site's standing was. In the "Rating" column next to "Medservis," different copies show values of 4, 1, and 0.76, whereas in the medical section the top spot went to "Omnimed" with 40, and second place to "MEDOPTTORG" with 15. In the "Kitchen and refrigeration" section, whose page is dated May 27, 2002, "Medservis" with 0.76 ranked fifth: above it were "Thermoelectric refrigerators" (13.29), "POLAIR" (4.07), the Oka-2000 trading house (2.6), and "Vitel's solar refrigerator" (1.79). Medservis.nn.ru does not appear in our surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating itself — it entered the scope of the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating only through the directory.
In the results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004 online vote, medservis.nn.ru is not listed[2]. This is the ordinary fate of a corporate storefront: such sites were not made for an audience or for contests, but so that a hospital or school procurement officer could find a phone number and a list of product groups.
How it closed
The exact date the site appeared in our data is not recorded. The web archive index for medservis.nn.ru lists 44 records, but only one snapshot preserved the home page's connected text — March 26, 2017[1]. It also remains the last one: there are no later snapshots in our sample, and the domain medservis.nn.ru is listed as inactive.
Of a Nizhny Novgorod supplier of hospital and school equipment that had operated since 1992, one page remains online: a four-item menu, nine product sections, an address on Kazanskoye Shosse, and four phone numbers.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2017 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)