rati.r52.ru was the website of the trading firm OOO "RATI-NN", which offered rubber-technical and other industrial materials. It operated in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru; the copyright notice on the home page read "© 2000 OOO \"RATI-NN\""[1]. In the web archive the site is represented by snapshots from May 20, 2001 to August 13, 2006.

What the firm did

The only home page snapshot that has survived for us contains an "About the company" section — essentially a brief self-presentation and a list of goods. As the home page stated, "our firm holds one of the leading positions in the production and sale of the following types of products"[1].

What followed was a long list of the product range: V-belts (fan belts and variator belts), hoses of all kinds, tubing, rubber sheet (SMKShch, MBS, food-grade, sponge, vacuum), raw rubber grades V-14 and 6620, PVC and cotton insulating tape, conveyor belt, dielectric mats, S8-CA adhesive, asbestos in the form of board, cord, cloth, tape, sheet and crumb, paronite (PON "b", PMB, reinforced, electrolyzer-grade), asbestos and asbestos-free packing, brake tape, shoes and linings, as well as fluoroplastic, textolite, caprolon, acrylic glass, vinyl plastic and fiberglass cloth[1]. The page described its customer base only in general terms: the firm claimed business relations "with many leading enterprises of Russia and the CIS" in the field of manufacturing industrial products, material and technical supply for the fuel and energy sector, and rail transport[1]. The text ended with the advertising slogan "Our products are a guarantee of your enterprise's success"[1]. The nn.ru catalog, from whose directory the site made it into our sample, described RATI differently and more narrowly — as a trading firm engaged in wholesale and retail supply of rubber-technical products.

What the site looked like

Based on the surviving text, this was a corporate calling card: a header with the firm's name — in the snapshot it is named simply OOO "RATI", without the "NN" suffix — a single substantive section, "About the company", and a list of the product range. The surviving text contains no postal address, no phone number, no employee names, and no price list[1]. No visitor counters are visible either: no rating-system badges appear in the snapshot's text. How many pages the site had in total cannot be said from our materials: only the text of one home-page snapshot has reached us.

At the bottom of the page was the line "Coding by Teamoty Brane Inc."[1] — the signature of whoever built the page. What firm this was, our materials do not say.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site's belonging to the Nizhny Novgorod Internet is established by its address: a third-level domain in the Nizhny Novgorod zone r52.ru. Added to this is the "NN" suffix in the firm's name and the site's listing in the directory of the Nizhny Novgorod catalog nn.ru; there are no direct indications of the city — an address or phone number — in the surviving text of the home page. According to our data, the site had no public visibility. It does not appear in the final voting table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day for 2004[2]. Its position is likewise not recorded in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter — neither a rank nor a visitor count is present for it in our data; more on how this sample is constructed — in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

How it closed

The web archive holds 29 captures of the address rati.r52.ru. The first snapshot is dated May 20, 2001[1], the last — August 13, 2006; there are no later captures in the archive. The domain rati.r52.ru no longer exists today — our check of address status lists it as non-existent, and there is no way to recover the site's content other than through the archived snapshots. The only surviving text of the home page dates to 2001 and carries a 2000 copyright notice; what the site was like in its final years, and what became of the firm itself, cannot be judged from our materials.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet voting, 2004 (archive)