Networking Questions and Answers - Web Browser Defaults to www.ask.com

Kyle writes in with a networking question

Question: When I pull up the internet it goes to my home page but when I go to type in the address bar like I type yahoo.com it pulls up an ask.com search but if I type www.yahoo.com in the address bar it won’t pull up the ask.com search so please help.

Answer: This issue with ask.com may be caused by a couple of things. Some internet providers will redirect you to a certain search site or other site if you type the name of the site you are meaning to go to wrong in the address bar. So by not putting the www in for Yahoo it may consider that as a mistype and redirect you to ask.com. You can test this by typing in some random thing in your browser such as www.giepz2dsa3.com and see if it takes you to ask.com. Your ISPs DNS servers may be redirecting you there. If so you can call them and see if they can give you another DNS server to use or some other way to get away from the browser redirection.

It can also be caused by a spyware/malware infection or the ask.com browser helper. Run some spyware scans including Hijack This and see if you can find and remove any references to ask.com. You can find more information on Hijack his and other free anti-spyware tools here.

Also make sure you don't have the Ask toolbar installed.

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