There are two issues coming up. The first is that when I do a search and get a list of hits, clicking on my choice often does not take me to the page I want. Instead, about 50-60% of the time, I go to a secondary search page, and not always the same one (all I really know about those secondary search engines is that they NEVER let you get to an actual webpage).
Sometimes, instead of taking me to the secondary search engine, Firefox gives me a red-flag with the option to “Get me out of here!” Which takes me to the Mozilla Firefox start page.
But you know how at the bottom of each hit on the results page, there’s a url? If I copy that url and paste it into the address bar of the secondary search engine, I get to go to the page I wanted.
The other odd thing that’s happening is on image searches. Google won’t let me get to the bottom of the page of images and view the rest of the thumbnails/links. I get a large vertical scroll bar that takes up most of the right side of the screen, and only moves down a couple of pixels.
My netbook is an Acer AspireOne, running Windows XP, and I am currently browsing the internet with Firefox. My anti-virus program is NOD32 by ESET, and I’m running Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (which, despite finding and removing four trojans after I loaded it yesterday, has not had any effect on this issue). I’ve tried both Quick scan and full scan.
Anybody encounter this problem (and its fix) before? Many thanks in advance.
The first issue reeks of some kind of malware redirecting you to its search engine, which you correctly state never actually take you to a real page, just to it’s paid advertisers shit. The “Get me out of here!” option that sometimes comes up seems to confirm this. Try another anti-malware program, like Windows Defender.
The second issue maybe related to the new format google images went to recently…it no longer has separate “pages”, the more you scroll down, the more “pages” load and automatically insert themselves below the images you are viewing. Do you have something like NoScript running? That might prevent google images from loading the rest.
Okay, I just looked up NoScript, and see that it’s a Firefox add-on. Since the symptom developed before I put Firefox on this computer, I’m going to release that particular utility from suspicion.
Sounds like a DNS hijack, which can be done in a couple of ways. One is simply to change your PC’s nameserver IP addresses, which could not be detected by any kind of anti-malware software because it has no way of knowing what they should be. Check to confirm that the settings are what your ISP says they should be, or – assuming you are using a router – just set them to the router’s address (usually 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1). The router, generally supplied by the ISP, likely has the correct settings.
The same type of hijack, though, could be accomplished through using BHOs or registry entries. Those should be caught by anti-malware tools, and in fact may be what you have seen Malwarebytes deal with. But it’s not at all uncommon for those tools not to be able to remove threats completely. Personally, I’ve only been successful by examining logs of what’s being loaded as the machine boots and then manually killing processes, deleting files, and editing registry entries. The automated tools can help knock down the number of problems but in my experience rarely finish the job.
I would be interested in knowing the diagnosis and remedy to the first problem. I had a very similar thing happen one day and the following day the computer was hard down, couldn’t do anything. Some diagnosis software from Microsoft said malware.