I cannot use Google, or any other search engine at all. I'm thinking I might have a virus, but being unable to search for anything, I have no idea. I scanned with Norton, it says everything is clean, but still nothing. To browse the web, I now have to know the exact URL of the site. Hyperlinks still work fine though, except in IE6, popups and other pages that open in a new window will just show a blank page. I've tried reinstalling IE6 to no success due to it detecting a "newer version" already installed So I switched to Mozilla, and everything is fine, except the huge matter of me still unable to search using Google or any other major search engine for that matter. Help please.
I have the exact same problem. No search engines have worked for me for over 2 weeks. Any advice anyone could give would be greatly appreciated.
SPYBOT SEARCH AND DESTROY - Once you access the page, scroll down for download - once you install the program and before you run it, search for updates, then run the program, there should be about 9700 items Spybot should be searching for. your browser has been hijacked, most likely...
You might have the virus. What the trojan does is it blocks all search engines in your hosts file in Windows then the trojan removes itself. That's why your virus scanner may say you don't have a virus, despite it still doing it's damage. If you use the removal tool that was linked, a notepad file should open up on your desktop. It should say it found one file and removed 6 other things in your registry. If it doesn't, just to be safe, go to Start==>Search==> and if your using XP select all files and folders, then type in hosts. Search for the hosts file that's in Windows/Help/ and open it in notepad. If at the top of the document it says 88.88.88.88.88 Elite then you did have the trojan installed on your computer. Below it, it should have a list of all the search engines from google, msn, yahoo, etc. Select all of them and delete it. Run the removal tool again to make sure nothing else was found, then install this security patch from Microsoft that I'm about to link to stop the virus from breaching your computer again. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-040.asp ' Restart your computer, and see if the search engines work for you again.
then go to the microsoft update page and get ALL necessary and critical updates and continue to regularly update the software as recommended by microsoft.
