raduga-poisk.nnov.ru was the site of Raduga-Poisk, a Nizhny Novgorod paging operator that later also sold IP telephony, call-center services, and car alarms. The home page described the company with the words "Nizhny Novgorod Regional Paging"[1], and service notices gave local coordinates: fax (8312) 30-15-39 and access numbers in Nizhny Novgorod and Dzerzhinsk[2]. A February 2006 news item named the owner as OOO Raduga-Poisk[3]. The site's copyright notice counted from 1999[1]; the first web-archive snapshot of the home page is dated December 15, 1999, and the last is dated May 8, 2007[5].

What the site looked like

From the March 2003 snapshot only three lines survive: the headline "Raduga-Poisk. Nizhny Novgorod Regional Paging," the line "copyright Raduga-Poisk 1999," and the developer credit "designed by Graphit"[1]. The archive preserved no substantive text on the home page at that point.

By February 2005 the site was running on an engine with sections, registration, and a forum. The "Navigation" menu consisted of the items "About the company," "News," "Paging," "IP Telephony," "Call Center," "Car Alarms," "Contacts," "new on the site"[2]. A separate "Service" block held a single link — "Send a message to a pager"[2]: the main function subscribers actually visited the operator's site for. Below that was a login form with "Username" and "Password" fields, links to "Create a new user" and "Request a new password"[2], a block of Central Bank of Russia exchange rates for the dollar, euro, and pound[2], and a classifieds board "Used pagers" with "Offer" and "Demand" sections[2]. The forum at that point held only two topics, both with self-explanatory titles: "So paging is still alive!" and "The site has launched"[2]. The news feed ran to seven pages by early 2005 and to nine pages by 2007[3]. The design was credited to "Graphit" and "Hamlet"[3]; the user hamlet also posted the 2006 news items, and the user bos posted the 2004 ones[2][3].

From paging to telephony

The 2004 news feed shows an operator whose core business was visibly losing value. On October 15, 2004, as the home page reported, "Another price cut on pagers! Nothing like it before — a pager over 1000 rubles has become a rarity!"; the same notice suggested buying a child a pager for under 300 rubles, since if it were stolen or lost "the family budget won't suffer"[2].

In parallel, the company was expanding into IP telephony. From October 14, 2004, rates for long-distance and international calls made with Raduga-Poisk calling cards were reduced, and calls under 15 seconds stopped being billed[2]. From November 10, 2004, there was a joint promotion with the Euroset chain of stores, and from November 25 with the Svyaznoy chain: a buyer of a corded telephone set received a free Raduga-Poisk IP calling card[2]. On December 1, 2004, the site published a notice that the TSPRI (IP telephony) access number 23-10-10 in Dzerzhinsk would be replaced from December 10 by 8(22)30-30-77 in Nizhny Novgorod, and that requests for reprogramming telephones and mini-PBXs were accepted by fax at (8312) 30-15-39[2].

By 2007 the shift in profile was reflected in the menu itself: the "IP Telephony" item had become "TELEPHONY + INTERNET"[3]. From February 11, 2006, OOO Raduga-Poisk began offering telephony services from Zebra Telecom, promising savings of up to 80% on long-distance and international calls, with universal telephony and internet payment cards sold "at all communication-service outlets in the city"[3]. From April 25, 2006, Raduga-Poisk and Zebra Telecom introduced a corporate PIN service for legal entities[3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site made our list via the nn.ru directory, whose description listed the site's sections: company information, pagers, services, service, coverage area, roaming, news, message sending (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). It was the directory, not the rating: in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, no ranking is recorded for raduga-poisk.nnov.ru. In the surviving results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, the domain likewise does not appear[4]. For the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, this is a typical second-tier figure: a corporate service site living not on traffic but on the fact that subscribers used it to send a message to a pager.

How it closed

No separate closure notice ever appeared on the home page. Signs of abandonment are visible in the 2007 snapshot itself: the forum block is filled with foreign-language spam — "1st for furniture," "Adult Sex Toy Shopping" — and repeated ads selling a code grabber, with the same lines appearing in both the "active" and "new" topics[3]. Meanwhile the copyright notice in the footer stopped at "©1999-2005," even though the page was captured in 2007[3], and the most recent news item is dated April 25, 2006[3]. The last web-archive snapshot of the home page is dated May 8, 2007[5]; the domain's subsequent fate cannot be traced with the data available to us.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Snapshots of raduga-poisk.nnov.ru in the web archive (archive)