Like the home page hijack, a search engine hijack typically makes the hacker money by displaying advertisements or misleading search results. Often malware of some sort will change your default search engine to be something you’ve never heard of and don’t recognize. You can, of course, change the search engine to whatever you’d like. Once again, the defaults are fairly standard: Internet Explorer defaults to using Microsoft Bing, Google Chrome defaults to using Google, and so on. They either have a separate search field in their toolbar, or they’ll automatically search for anything that you type into the address bar that the browser doesn’t recognize as a URL. This article shows you how: How do I change my browser home page back to what I want? Browser search enginesĪnother type of fairly common hijack changes the default search provider used by your browser.Īlmost all browsers now have the ability to act as a quick search interface. The solution is usually pretty simple: reset your browser’s home page setting to what you want. That page isn’t on your computer it’s just that your browser has been reconfigured to display it, instead of what you really want. That means each time you run the browser, or each time you click on that home button, you’re taken to this other web page. Some forms of malware hijack the homepage setting, and change it to a different page – often a page that somehow makes the hackers money by displaying some form of advertising. These are also the pages the browsers return to when you click on the “Home” button that’s normally shown in the address bar or toolbar. If you use Google Chrome, it usually opens up to. If you fire up Internet Explorer, for example, the default web page it shows is typically msn.com.
The most common problem that folks confuse with a web page being on their computer is simply that their browser’s home page has been changed.īrowsers typically display a web page when they start up, before you’ve asked the browser to go somewhere else.
So asking how to remove a website from your computer doesn’t really even make sense there’s no website on your computer to remove. Your browser is simply displaying pages from the site. The Ask Leo! website was never “on” your computer.
If you visit a different page – say, the URL for this article – then your web browser fetches that webpage and displays this article. When you visit in your browser, the browser fetches and displays the home page for the Ask Leo! web site. You view websites by firing up your web browser (a program like Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, or others) and using it to go to a specific website and read its web pages.įor example, Ask Leo! is a website.
You watch TV programs by turning on your TV and going to a specific channel to see a specific show. Websites aren’t in your computer in the same way that television programs aren’t in your TV. Let’s look at why the difference matters, and what kind of problem this might really be. But a website “on” your computer isn’t it. I’m not saying there isn’t a problem or something annoying going on – there probably is.
Unless you’re an actual website developer, websites aren’t on your computer.
Unfortunately, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly how things work.