What's Up With my Google Search Results?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve tried googling this problem itself, but it’s a very peculiar problem that I don’t know how to search for.

When I query a search in Google and hit enter, the page of results comes up as normal. However, when I click on any of the results, I get redirected to a page “server not found page.” The tab title is “Problem loading page.” The address in the address bar is very convoluted and seems to have something to do with Google ads.

Here’s an example. I searched for “lapped seams” and clicked on the first result. The page I was led to has the following url: (linked here for readability). However, the page should be Needlework Books

This just started today. I’m using Firefox 3.6.8. What’s the deal here??

2

May have been hijacked by a virus. Try the usual stuff to search your computer.

3

Using FF 3.6.8 results in:

[ol]
[li]Images for lapped seams[/li][li]Lapped Seam[/li][li]Seam types - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/li][/ol]

as the first three.

I concur the problem is within your machine, possibly a hijack of some sort.

4

I agree. You most likely have a virus. I had the recently popular anti-virus virus thing on my computer and thought I had it all cleared up and discovered the same problem. I ended up using HijackThis to clear it up, but I think there are easier ways.

5

About a year ago I had a trojan on my computer at work that was hijacking google search results. The top 5-10 results would link to various commercial and even NSFW sites, while the descriptions were kept intact.

6

It is a common virus and it will hijack all of your browsers and redirect results from Google, Yahoo!, and others. Some of the viruses are easy to spot: check your browser’s configuration and see if it is using a local HTTP proxy. As Baracus said, HijackThis is good for cleaning these up.

7

Wow, Thank you! This has been driving me nuts and I thought it was something wrong with Google.

8

I’ve just had Google be unavailable for an extended period of time, the website simply failed to load, no obvious sign of redirection.

I’ve run Superantispyware and Malware Bytes without finding anything and Google now appears to be working as normal. How do I check for a check for a local proxy as you indicated in firefox?

I opened Options > Advanced > Network > Settings “Use system proxy settings” is checked and the “no proxy for:” box reads “localhost, XXX.X.X.X” (numbers redacted by me)

9

Are the redacted numbers 127.0.0.1?

10

You found the page I was referring to. In your case, "Use system proxy settings tells Firefox to use whatever proxy settings are configured in the OS. What OS are you using (Windows 7, OS X, etc.)?

BTW: No proxy for ‘localhost, 127.0.0.1’ is fine. It just means never use a proxy for webpages that are on my own machine.