job.52rus.ru is a Nizhny Novgorod website of free job listings, titled "Work in Nizhny Novgorod Region"[1]. Users posted vacancies and résumés for Nizhny Novgorod and the Region themselves; the site described itself as a portal and an aid to finding employment[1]. In the listing of the Counter.nn.ru rating and in contest lists, the project appears as "Job and Personnel Search Site JOB-52RUS" (see the archival study of the rating). In the web archive, the site can be traced from October 2004, and the last snapshot of the domain was taken on July 9, 2009[1][2].
What the site looked like
The home page was laid out as simply as possible. The horizontal menu consisted of five items: "Home," "Add," "Browse," "Search," "Contact"[1]. A separate column carried short announcements from the administration with a link to the "News Archive"[1].
The terms of use fit into a single paragraph: whoever posted a listing received an ID with which they could delete their own data from the database; a vacancy or résumé was kept for 30 days; posting and browsing listings were free[1]. The free service was emphasized in the page's service description as well: as the home page put it, "Everything, including viewing contact information, is FREE!"[1].
The site displayed the size of its database openly. As of October 9, 2004, it held 64 vacancies and 58 résumés[1]. Two weeks earlier, on September 30, 2004, the administration had posted the news item "The number of vacancies and résumés is already over 50!!!", and on September 27 a word of thanks: "The number of vacancies and résumés is growing. The administration of job.52rus.ru thanks users for their help in developing the portal"[1]. These three data points show both the pace of growth and the scale: we are talking about dozens of listings, not thousands.
A snapshot of the Nizhny Novgorod labor market, autumn 2004
The main page displayed lists of the latest additions, and they have been preserved in the snapshot — a ready-made cast of who was being sought and who was looking for work in the Region in the fall of 2004.
Latest vacancies: courier, taxi dispatcher, warehouse worker/typesetter, "sales manager for construction materials/petroleum products," sales consultant[1]. Latest résumés: "web design," chief accountant, "PR or advertising manager," "Any," and "Self-servise store manager" — the last line is given exactly as it appeared on the site, with a typo in the word "self-service" (the Russian original misspells "самообслуживания")[1]. Judging by this line, the site had neither moderation of wording nor proofreading: texts went into the database exactly as the visitor entered them.
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet
The site job.52rus.ru is listed among the entries of the 2004 Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet.[3] This did not bring it prominence, however: in the published voting results the site does not appear among the winners or runners-up, and no votes are recorded for it[3]. Nor does it have a position in the traffic rankings of Counter.nn.ru, which in those years served as the main yardstick of the local web.
Thus job.52rus.ru is a typical case of the second tier: a working service with a real, if small, database of listings, which lived alongside the big Nizhny Novgorod platforms but made it into neither the counter nor the contest results. Such projects are visible only through archived snapshots.
How it shut down
In total, the web archive holds nine captures of the domain. The last of them, on July 9, 2009, found not a website but a hosting provider's placeholder page: the "Site disabled" page stated that "the site is temporarily blocked" and directed the owner to the control panel at my.mtw.ru or to the staff of the provider mtw.ru[2]. The Moscow phone numbers and addresses listed there belonged to the hosting company, not to job.52rus.ru itself[2]. The shutdown was formally declared temporary, but there is no trace of the site's return in the archive: the snapshot with the placeholder turned out to be the last one.
The interval between the archive's first and last captures of the domain — from October 2004 to July 2009 — outlines the project's lifespan[1][2]. The domain job.52rus.ru no longer exists, and the project did not move anywhere.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Last snapshot of the domain, 2009 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Voting results of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, 2004 (archive)