A Tour of the findnix.eu User Area: 21 Modules for Site Owners and What They Do Under the Hood

findnix.eu is a GDPR-first metasearch engine with its own index, and the account area has grown into a toolbox for people who run websites. Most modules are free with an account; the advertising packages are the paid part. This is the full tour, grouped by what you want to get done, with a note on how each one works where that is interesting.

Get your site into the index and keep it healthy

Submit a sitemap. Register a domain and a sitemap URL (XML, a PHP script that outputs XML, or an RSS 2.0 feed) or submit single URLs. Submissions are checked against spam lists and for duplicates. You prove ownership with a small token file on your server or a meta tag in your homepage head, and the crawler picks the sitemap up on its next run. If your sitemap carries <title> and <description> per URL, we use them directly, so the page doesn't need to be fetched just for its metadata.

Sitemap Generator. Enter a start URL, choose a crawl depth of 1 to 4 and up to 200 pages, edit the list it finds (add or remove URLs, set change frequency and priority per page) and download a standards-compliant sitemap.xml. It skips external links, media files and typical admin and login paths.

DNSBL Tester. Checks a domain or IP against 20 DNS blacklists (Spamhaus ZEN, SpamCop, Barracuda, SORBS and others) and sends a certificate with a unique number by e-mail. You can schedule a repeat check every 7, 14, 28 or 31 days, and each certificate page offers an embeddable SVG badge. One implementation detail: the lookups go through a dedicated external DNS resolver, because shared hosting resolvers get rate-limited by some blacklist providers and then report false "listed" results.

Analytics. A visitor counter with no cookies and no IP storage. You register a site, paste one script tag into your head, and get views for today, the last 7 days and in total, the top pages of the last 30 days and the split by device type.

Images

Reverse image search. Upload an image (JPG, PNG, GIF or WebP up to 5 MB) or paste a URL, and the tool searches findnix's own image index plus IQDB for similar images.

Image protection. Adds a text or logo watermark to many images at once, with five positions, adjustable size and opacity, and WebP as the default output format to save space. It is deliberately internal: there is no embed code, the protected images are just offered for download.

Tools for building

Generator suite. Nineteen small tools in one place: RSS feed, meta tags (including Open Graph and Twitter Card), a CSS generator with six sub-generators (button, box shadow, border radius, gradient, text shadow, animation), .htaccess, password, QR code, color palette, Lorem Ipsum, Base64, slug, image placeholder, favicon links, mailto: links, hash (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512) and a short URL generator with a private list and click counter. Most of them run entirely in the browser, and nothing is sent to the server. The exceptions are the CSS gallery where you can share designs, the short URL generator, and the QR and placeholder tools, which call external APIs. The password generator uses the Web Crypto API, and the color and button generators show the WCAG contrast ratio live.

Form generator. Assemble a form from a palette of field types, label and reorder the fields, choose where it posts to (your own endpoint, Formspree and similar) or fall back to mailto:, and copy or download a complete HTML document. It is 100% client-side: no form, field name or target address is ever stored. Reordering uses arrow buttons instead of drag and drop on purpose, so it works without a mouse, and the generated markup has real labels, aria-required and an aria-live status region.

Widgets for your own site

Rating widget. Collect reviews with stars, an emoji mood, category ratings (service, quality, speed) and a free-text comment, as a floating button or embedded inline. Each registered site gets a dashboard with all ratings and a delete function, and one rating per IP and day is accepted to prevent repeat votes.

Share widget. Share buttons for Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and a copy-link button, in three designs and with your own colors, without cookies or stored IP addresses.

Ad widget. Embed a findnix banner (728×90, 300×250 or 300×100) on your own site and earn points for impressions and clicks from different visitors.

Advertising and visibility

Advertising is a flat rate with no bidding and at most three ads per page, always labeled as ads. Booking offers three plans: Starter (currently 9 € per month, one ad, DE/AT/CH targeting), Business (49 €, up to three ads, EU-wide, real-time dashboard) and Enterprise (199 €, up to ten ads, all countries, priority placement). You pay by invoice and bank transfer. My ad is where you write the ad itself (title, display URL, target URL, description, keywords, country codes) with a live preview, and ads are reviewed within about a day. Highlight puts a frame and a star on your main domain when it shows up in results anyway; the organic order does not change, and it requires an approved sitemap. Sell a domain gives a quick heuristic valuation (a 0 to 100 score, a category and a rough price range based on TLD, length, hyphens, digits and industry keywords) and lets you list the domain as an ad. Inquiries arrive in a mailbox inside your account, so your e-mail address never appears publicly.

AI

AI Hub is a bring-your-own-key portal at ai.findnix.eu: chat with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Mistral, image generation with DALL-E and Stability AI, text to speech with ElevenLabs, a code assistant and video generation with Runway. You use your own provider keys and are billed by the provider, not by us. Keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM, each with its own nonce, and a link in your account signs you in without a second registration.

Community and points

Many actions earn points, and one point is worth 1.5 cents toward plans and highlights. The wishlist takes feature ideas and pays 50 points when one is implemented. Donations let you choose a charity, generate a donation receipt with bank details and a GiroCode QR, and pays 5 points per euro after you upload the transfer receipt and we check it. My journal lets you submit articles and finds for the findnix.eu Journal, which are translated into 24 languages after approval.

Your account

Security & 2FA adds TOTP two-factor authentication (FreeOTP, Google Authenticator or Authy) with single-use backup codes, plus password changes. Profile holds your avatar, display name and billing details, and your personal invite link: every friend who registers through it earns you 30 points.

Why it looks like this

The pattern across all of it is the same: do as much as possible in the browser, store as little as possible on the server, and say so on the page. The modules are plain PHP and MariaDB like the rest of findnix.eu.

The user area is at findnix.eu/user, and every module is described in more detail, in 24 languages, in the module section of the Journal.