or is Google shit now?

[MoonGirl1981]

Seriously, every time I type something in I get my usual list of sites as I did before but now whenever I click on them I end up either on another search engine which I can't 'back button' out of and have to start again or I end up on some retail site which may have some teeny link with what I typed in.

Rarely can I click on the link on the page and just go to it.

Have I got a virus which is doing this? Or is this how Google is now??

It's a virus. We had one a while back. We were constantly redirected to other search engines we couldn't get out of or had serious porn images pop up!

I spoke to someone who said it had probably been downloaded inadvertently from youtube.

Ooooo, really??

I shall have that looked at!

Thank you!!

:)

See if it's called ShoppersDirect - if it is, we had it a while ago. It is almost impossible to get rid of. and we gave up. We went to Tools, Add-ons and 'disabled'. That worked. We got it from YouTube as well.

I use the nectar site for searching now, not Google. You get points! :)

Well I hope it helps. I just asked my DH how he sorted it and he said "we started again". Which I took to mean he reformatted the computer (which I think he did).

Hope you get it sorted. Some of the images made my eyes water! I had no idea people could do such things!

ShoppersDirect rings a bell...

It was really annoying though.

Google is rubbish now. I'm on a mac so it presumably isn't a virus for me. The results are usually packed with content aggregation sites that contain one or two lines taken from the website I'm actually looking for but no link to it. One utterly bizarre website called wn.com always seems to come up with a useless page whenever I'm googling. I also hate the huge number of websites that automatically copy Wikipedia cluttering up the search results.

And it has this annoying habit now of assuming I mean something I don't. I was looking for an article from the Indy about being posh. Google automatically substitutes the word "posh" for "expensive" "best" "nicest" and many other "synonyms" which meant I got a ridiculous number of totally unrelated results.

Download and run two pieces of software. Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. One of them should clear whatever is causing the problem.

yy Schomberg to google assuming you mean something you didn't.

If I google an obscure word, or something that is deliberately misspelled (eg because it's a brand name), Google will "helpfully" correct it for me to a more normal word or spelling.

Google, please would you assume I know how to spell and type. Thanks.

malwarebytes is another good bit of software to download to get rid of nasties