job.52rus.ru — a Nizhny Novgorod site of free job classifieds, titled "Work in the Nizhny Novgorod Region"[1]. Users posted vacancies and CVs for Nizhny Novgorod and the region themselves; the site described itself as a portal and as help in finding employment[1]. In the inventory of the Counter.nn.ru rating and of the competition lists the project is recorded as "JOB-52RUS job and staff search site" (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). In the web archive the site can be traced from October 2004; the last snapshot of the domain was taken on 9 July 2009[1][2].
What the site looked like
The home page was arranged as simply as possible. The horizontal menu consisted of five items: "Home", "Add", "View", "Search", "Contact"[1]. A separate column carried short news items from the administration with a link to the "News archive"[1].
The terms of use fitted into a single paragraph: whoever placed an advertisement received an identifier by which they could delete their own data from the database; the storage period for a vacancy or a CV was 30 days; placing and viewing advertisements were free of charge[1]. The absence of any charge was emphasised in the page's service description as well: as the home page announced, "Everything, including viewing contact information, is FREE!"[1].
The site displayed the size of its database openly. As of 9 October 2004 it listed 64 vacancies and 58 CVs[1]. Two weeks earlier, on 30 September 2004, the administration had put up the news item "The number of vacancies and CVs is already more than 50!!!", and on 27 September a note of thanks: "The number of vacancies and CVs is growing. The administration of job.52rus.ru thanks its users for their help in developing the portal"[1]. These three markers show both the pace at which the base filled up and its scale: the figures ran to dozens of advertisements, not thousands.
A cross-section of the Nizhny Novgorod labour market, autumn 2004
The home page displayed lists of the most recent entries, and they have survived in the snapshot — a ready-made impression of who was being sought and who was seeking work in the region in the autumn of 2004.
The latest vacancies: courier, taxi dispatcher, warehouse keeper and order picker, "manager for the sale of building materials/petroleum products", sales consultant[1]. The latest CVs: "web design", chief accountant, "PR or advertising manager", "Any" and "Director of a self-service store" — the last line is reproduced as it stood on the site, with a typo in the word "self-service"[1]. Judging by that line, there was neither moderation of the wording nor proofreading on the site: texts went into the database exactly as the visitor had typed them.
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
job.52rus.ru entered our inventory of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet through the lists of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004[3]. This, however, brought it no prominence: in the published voting results the site does not appear among the winners or the runners-up, and no votes are recorded for it[3]. Nor did it hold a position in the Counter.nn.ru traffic rating, which in those years served as the main measuring stick of the local network.
job.52rus.ru is thus a typical case of the second tier: a working service with a real, if small, database of advertisements, which existed alongside the large Nizhny Novgorod platforms but made it neither into the counter nor into the competition results. Projects of this kind are visible only through archival snapshots.
How it closed
In all, nine visits to the domain have been preserved in the web archive. The last of them, on 9 July 2009, found not the site but a service stub page of the hosting provider: a page headed "Site disabled" reported that "the site has been temporarily blocked" and referred the owner to the control panel at my.mtw.ru or to the provider's staff at mtw.ru[2]. The Moscow telephone numbers and addresses given there belonged to the hosting company, not to job.52rus.ru itself[2]. Formally the shutdown was declared temporary, but there are no traces of the site's return in the archive: the snapshot with the stub page turned out to be the last.
The interval between the archive's first and last visits to the domain — from October 2004 to July 2009 — is what outlines the project's lifespan[1][2]. At the time of our check the domain job.52rus.ru does not exist, and the project did not move anywhere else.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Last snapshot of the domain, 2009 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)