inomarka.nn.ru was a Nizhny Novgorod car website of the early 2000s, a service for ordering used foreign-made cars from abroad. The address sat in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone nn.ru, and the site itself was listed in the directory of the "Nizhny Novgorod OnLine" portal under "Firms (Enterprises): Auto: Car Dealerships" and counted its visits with the regional counter Counter.nn.ru under number 3000[1]. Judging by the surviving web archive snapshots, the site was active from June 2002 to March 2003[2][3]. Its own news item about the opening was dated May 13, with no year given.

What it was

The directory card described the project as follows: "A system for ordering used cars. Ordering cars of the major manufacturers from abroad, delivery to Russia, short deadlines, low prices. A catalog and ordering system for auto parts, private listings for selling, buying, and exchanging cars" (spelling as in the original, including the misspelled "deadlines")[4]. In other words, three services were claimed at once: brokerage for importing cars, an auto parts store, and a board of private classifieds.

None of them survives in the web archive: the snapshots capture only the home page, and the home page was built as a news showcase. The top block, "News of INOMARKA.nn.ru," consisted of a single entry that never changed during the entire period of observation: "05/13 Opening of the INOMARKA.nn.ru site. We are open! Glad to welcome you to our site," as the home page reported[2][5][3].

Below it came the "Auto News" block, a feed of other outlets' industry reports, fifteen headlines per page, with the switches "[ 0-15 ][ 15-30 ][ 30-45 ][ Next»» ]" and a separate "[ Search»» ]" link[2]. The feed was global and national, with almost nothing local: on June 4, 2002, the home page carried items about Mitsubishi's plans to build cars in China, a Mercedes-Benz representative office in Cuba, and rising gasoline prices in the US, and only one line touched on the region: "AvtoVAZ received a gold medal at the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition"[2]. By March 20, 2003, the feed was being updated in the same fashion: "Cars of the Year named in Russia," "Newspaper: there will be no cheap foreign cars," "Russian buses cut production by 1.6%"[3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The nn.ru rubricator listed the site in at least two car-related categories, and both showed its counter-based rating. In "Car Trade," in the snapshot of June 23, 2002, INOMARKA was in fourth place with a rating of 334, behind the firm VOLGA TRADE (1226), AvtoSpetsSbyt (1203), and the firm TSS (921)[1]. In the category "Trade in Spare Parts, Components, and Accessories," on August 16, 2002, it was again in fourth place, with a rating of 373[6]. In July 2002 the site appeared in the rubricator's selection of new resources with a rating of 338[7]. The rubricator took the figure itself from Counter.nn.ru: next to each line was a link to the counter's card, and for INOMARKA it led to card number 3000[1]. For how to read these figures, see the archival study of the rating.

The most telling evidence of traffic is the rubricator's "Most-Most" section, which collected sites "that rubricator visitors click through to most often according to data for the last 30 days." In the snapshot of November 17, 2002, INOMARKA was in 97th place with 170 click-throughs from the rubricator over the month, with a counter rating of 402[4]. The gap to its neighbors was a matter of single digits: 95th place was held by the site of the Nizhny Novgorod Region government (172 click-throughs), 96th by PSSR (171)[4]. This is what the middle of the list of popular resources of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet looked like in 2002.

How it closed

The last snapshot of the home page in the web archive is dated March 20, 2003[3]; there is no closure announcement or farewell post in the snapshots — the news feed simply breaks off. The domain inomarka.nn.ru no longer exists today.

The site does not appear in the final voting table of Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet 2004[8] — by the time of the contest it had not appeared in the archive for more than a year. Its row is also absent from the surviving samples of the counter.nn.ru tables: all the known rating figures — 334, 338, 373, and 402 — come from the nn.ru rubricator cards for 2002[1][7][4]. All that remains of the foreign-car ordering service is a catalog entry and three snapshots of its news feed.

Home Page by Year

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Companies: Auto: Car Dealers," 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, June 2002 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, March 2003 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "The Best of the Best" section, November 2002 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, November 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Companies: Auto: Parts, Components, and Accessories Sales," 2002 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "New Resources," 2002 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)