cant access search engines

[Mr Tony]

OK this is weird. I was at my dad's hooking up his new monitor (to his ancient computer.....Windows ME...need i say more). He got the monitor free. Nice monitor but its like putting a fresh coat of paint on a house that has been shredded by a tornado

So I get that hooked up and he says his internet is slow...downloaded firefox and that sped it up big time (his IE is old....again see above)

So I go to look up something for him and when I search via yahoo I get "page cannot be displayed" when I type in something. When I go to msn (he has DSL) and try the same thing I get same results.

Google gives me a cp error....

I think it has to do with the fact he had netzero before and I think that blocks all other search engines (stupid netzero). I completely removed netzero from the computer but it still won't work. I had the same issue 2 years ago when I went from netzero to dsl and don't remember how to override that. I have access to all search engines

Anyone know how to get the search engines back??

Its an old computer with Windows ME, Firefox and Qwest DSL

 

[mike123abc]

maybe check the windows system32 drivers etc hosts file and see if there are entries to redirect in there.

 

[Mr Tony]

can I get that in English?

I'm not computer savvy...satellite yes...computers no

and my dad has a hard enough time running his TV to know

 

[qwert1515]

can I get that in English?

I'm not computer savvy...satellite yes...computers no

and my dad has a hard enough time running his TV to know

Hehe

Go into "C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc" and open the "hosts" file with notepad and make sure it is blank.

Also you should try running anti-spyware software on the computer.

 

[harshness]

+1 on the qwert1515 suggestion.

More than likely there is a "Browser Helper Object" in there that is designed to re-route all search engine queries to a third party. BHOs are a very nasty thing and can be difficult to get rid of. NetZero probably installed one to make sure that their ads appear on every page searched, but this one may have been installed by something else. BHOs are a form of trojan horse.

 

[Pepper]

For Windows ME the "hosts" file is in the windows directory, not "system32\drivers\etc"

I was noticing earlier tonight much of the Internet was inaccessible. Something was going on somewhere in the at&t backbone.

 

[mike123abc]

can I get that in English?

I'm not computer savvy...satellite yes...computers no

and my dad has a hard enough time running his TV to know

Sorry about that, there is a hosts file that you can use to override the IP address of internet sites. Normally it has just one entry in it for localhost, the rest you get from your ISP. If someone wanted to redirect your search.yahoo.com they could put an entry like:

123.12.1.123 search.yahoo.com

in the file and every time you went to search.yahoo.com you would go to the site specified, instead of asking your ISP where the address is. There only should be an entry in there for "localhost".

 

[Hall]

More than likely there is a "Browser Helper Object" in there that is designed to re-route all search engine queries to a third party. BHOs are a very nasty thing and can be difficult to get rid of.

That would apply to Internet Explorer only though. If they have one for Mozilla/Firefox, since they weren't installed when NetZero was, it's not likely it added anything that would affect Moz/FF.

I would try some off-the-wall or new search engines. I do agree with the others that they're blocking this at a low level, like using 'hosts' to re-direct. That would affect *all* applications, of course.

 

[Mr Tony]

hall

so since I loaded firefox last night, that should solve the issue? I'll have to go over to my dads and check out the suggestions

 

[dfergie]

Maybe a clean install?

 

[Hall]

so since I loaded firefox last night, that should solve the issue? I'll have to go over to my dads and check out the suggestions

If it's a BHO (Browser Helper Object), sorta like a plug-in, yes, it might. As others have speculated though, it may be operating at a lower level, i.e. at the 'networking' level.

Do a search for "hosts". When you find it, copy it to the desktop, rename it with ".txt" extension, then open it. Post it here.

 

[Mr Tony]

well its fixed

I dont know what happened but I went over there and tried with firefox and same thing

So I did what hall said and pull up "hosts" and save it as a .txt
opened it and it showed yahoo, google, msn, and a few more but no netzero

then tried google and it worked. Tried yahoo and it worked too. So I threw that file in the trash and removed it to see if it would still work and it did still work

Thanks guys. Now my dad can google

 

[Hall]

So I did what hall said and pull up "hosts" and save it as a .txt opened it and it showed yahoo, google, msn, and a few more but no netzero

then tried google and it worked. Tried yahoo and it worked too.

Just in case you want to know, the 'hosts' file can be used to re-direct from one site to a different site(s). For example, your Dad's probably looked something like this:

64.136.45.38 www. google .com
64.136.45.38 www. yahoo .com

and so on....

That IP address is what I got for "search.netzero.net". What happens is anytime you type in "www.google.com" in the browser, you're instead sent to 64.136.45.38.

 

[Mr Tony]

goddamn your right. Thats EXACTLY what it said. But all I did was save that file as a txt and it worked fine since then

 

[Pepper]

if you dragged it somewhere, it likely "moved" instead of "copied" - when windows couldn't find "hosts" where it used to be, it works normally.

 

[Hall]

goddamn your right. Thats EXACTLY what it said.

Heh....

 

[Hall]

if you dragged it somewhere, it likely "moved" instead of "copied" - when windows couldn't find "hosts" where it used to be, it works normally.

I was wondering what Windows would do if it couldn't find the file at all and if that would be a problem. Appears that Windows doesn't *have* to have that file.

 

[mike123abc]

without the file you will not have an entry for localhost. But, I do not know of any programs that really depend on having localhost resolved.

127.0.0.1 localhost

is the only address windows should ship with. Other things you can do with the hosts file is put in entries for machines that do not have a registered or want to override. For example if you did not want to see ads any more from doubleclick.com you could put in:

127.0.0.1 www .doubleclick.net # note take the space out the forum resolves www if there no space
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net #remove this for atomfilms problems
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.com

Then any web page that wants to pull an ad from doubleclick would get redirected to your own computer, which probably does not have a web server running on it.

 

[Anole]

As an extension to what Mike said above . . .
you can use the HOSTS file to filter out all sorts of nefarious stuff:
hxxp://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm