Surf's Up on the Russian 'Net

By Bill Fick

While walking down the street in Ekaterinburg this summer, a glance at the facade of the central post office stopped me in my tracks. "INTERNET" in bold Cyrillic characters was emblazoned across the wall, dwarfing the more familiar and ordinary advertisements for Polaroid cameras and BASF videotapes.

Clearly, I thought as I continued on my way, the Internet in Russia is no longer just a curiosity for foreigners, physicists, and hackers, but well on its way to becoming a real mass medium as it has elsewhere in the world.

Just over a year ago, with a handful of exceptions Russian sites on the World Wide Web were mostly a dry array of educational institutions and computer companies. The Russian Academy of Science’s home page (http://www.ras.ru) contained a "clickable" map of Russia with a nearly comprehensive list of links to other webservers in various cities which fit completely on one screen.

Today, with the estimated number of sites in Russia approaching 1000, the Academy has broken its on-line map into separate regional subsections and city lists. The Russian Internet is an expanding crazyquilt where you can find a little bit of everything, a smaller reflection of the Internet at large.

Rapid growth in the number and diversity of Russian Internet users drives the development of new content. Reliable Internet user demographics for Russia do not yet exist, but The Russian Public Center for Internet Technology (ROCIT; http://www.rocit.ru) reported early this summer that there are at least 500,000 users of electronic mail across Russia, of which as many as 50,000 have access to a full range of on-line services, including the Web. These figures, ROCIT estimates, grow at a rate of 200 percent and 400 percent per year, respectively.

In an environment this dynamic, a brief survey tour of the "interesting" Russian websites is no longer possible, because they are so many and so various. There are, however, several servers which are excellent launching pads for a safari into the Russian Internet jungle.

"Russia on the Web" (http://www.ru), maintained by Demos, one of the two largest Internet service providers in Russia, offers an excellent English-language catalog listing of sites divided by subject areas. It looks and feels much like "Yahoo!" (http://www.yahoo.com), one of the best-known global Internet search engines, although its keyword-search capabilities are more limited.

The Russia On-Line (http://www.online.ru) website also contains excellent English and Russian lists of links divided into subject categories. The site itself is open to any Internet user, although some of the links connect to information resources available only to Russia On-Line subscribers.

Finally, "Weblist" (http://www.weblist.ru) attempts to maintain a comprehensive index of Russian servers and has interesting sections of "highlighted" pages and awards.

While most Websites in Russia have at least some English-language content, the bulk of what you will find is in Russian. In order to read it, you will need to configure your Web browser to use Cyrillic fonts.

To make matters more complicated, there are multiple incompatible "encoding" standards for Cyrillic fonts, with names you may encounter as your surf such as "Windows CP1251", "KOI-8" and "DOS 866". You can read information from the site only if the server’s font encoding matches that in your browser.

Good websites will usually support several of the major encoding schemes, and the most advanced now automatically discern the encoding in use on each visitor’s browser. To be on the safe side, however, it is always a good idea to have several different font encodings ready on your own computer.

For more information about encoding and free downloadable Cyrillic fonts, you can visit the "SovInformBureau" site established by a Russian immigrant in the USA (http://www.siber.com/sib/).

Equipped to read and write in Cyrillic, you can try out an experimental Russian-language keyword search engine called "New Russian Search" and located at the State Historical Library in Moscow (http://www.openweb.ru). It is unique in that it can resolve Russian grammar intelligently and will know, for example, that krasnii, krasnaya, and krasnogo are all declensions of the same keyword for "red".

Fonts and directory addresses in hand, you have all the tools you need to begin exploring the unique virtual world on the net in Russia. Future editions of this column will highlight news and trends on the Russian Web as well as global Internet developments that may be of special interest to the expat community here.

For now, enjoy your exploration and watch for proliferation of Internet references around you. If they’re advertising on post offices, it is only a matter of time before you will find a Web URL on an ad poster in the metro.