kupetchesky.ru is the domain name under which, in 2001, the nn.ru directory listed a Nizhny Novgorod restaurant called "Kupetchesky" (Merchant's): the directory described it as "one of the best restaurants in Nizhny Novgorod" with "excellent cuisine"[1]. The first snapshot of the site in the web archive is dated 2 February 2001 and confirms the same name[2]. By the mid-2010s the domain had lost its connection to the restaurant and passed to other owners; the last available snapshots date from 2016-2017[3][4].

Restaurant "Kupetchesky" and its first trace online

The only evidence of what the site was like originally is the entry in the nn.ru directory: the name "Restaurant \"Kupetchesky\"" and a brief description advertising its cuisine and its place among Nizhny Novgorod restaurants[1]. The earliest snapshot of the home page, preserved by the web archive on 2 February 2001, carries the same title — "Restaurant \"Kupetchesky\"" — but the rest of the page's content was not preserved in the archive, so the menu structure, sections, or contact details of the restaurant cannot be judged from this snapshot[2]. A later snapshot from 2014 reached the archive corrupted — in place of text it preserved an unreadable set of bytes, so the material has nothing to report about the site's content during this period.

A place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

kupetchesky.ru was recorded in the nn.ru directory — one of the address books of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s[1]. In the samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter and the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote preserved in our records, no rating or vote count is recorded for this domain — this indicates an absence of data in the sample, not zero traffic or zero support for the site[1].

A domain without a restaurant: content from 2016-2017

By March 2016 a different resource altogether occupied the site of the former restaurant: the home page, as the home page itself stated, was titled "I dreamed that a man in love with me stabbed me. | kupetchesky.ru" and amounted to an aggregator of questions and articles about health — with sections such as "Alcoholism," "Varicose veins," "Hemorrhoids," "Weight loss," interspersed with random off-topic forum questions, while the footer of the page read "Medical and health news | hotnewsline.com © 2016"[3]. There is no mention whatsoever of Nizhny Novgorod, the restaurant, or the site's former content in this snapshot. By May 2017 the domain carried an even narrower, highly specialized title, "compression stockings varicose veins - kupetchesky.ru," with publications on the same medical subject matter[4] — judging by the contrast with the first snapshot from 2001, by this time the site had long had nothing to do with the restaurant "Kupetchesky," and the domain had presumably changed hands.

The domain's fate

According to the web archive, in 2017 the domain kupetchesky.ru was associated with a redirect to pizzatto.ru[4]. From 2018 the site was in a parked state; at the time this survey was compiled, kupetchesky.ru no longer had a site of its own[4]. Thus the domain's path can be traced from a Nizhny Novgorod restaurant site of the early 2000s, through several years of unclear fate (a gap in snapshots between 2001 and 2014, a corrupted 2014 snapshot), to a faceless medical spam aggregator of 2016-2017, and onward to parking.

Sources

  1. kupetchesky.ru (archived)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archived)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archived)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2017 (archived)