A rather annoying thing is wanting to search for something from Chrome and we find ourselves with the surprise that the search engine is changed to Yahoo or Bing automatically Where is Google? Why would it be changed if we have not configured it like this? What can we do to solve this problem?
Many users have complained that, on many occasions, when they search in Google Chrome, they are automatically redirected to Yahoo or Bing search results. So let’s see how to fix it to be able to use the default search engine that we actually set.
The search engine is constantly changing to Yahoo or Bing
Check extensions
This problem usually happens thanks to malware. It is possible that we have accidentally installed some malicious extension in Google Chrome or another browser. Even when installing legitimate applications, we can install the occasional extension that is doing this.
Here the most important thing would be that we deactivate all the extensions, without exceptions. We will then start using the browser to search and check if the issue persists. In case the problem is solved. So, we confirm that an extension is causing it. We are going to proceed to activate one at a time to verify which of these is responsible.
In this case, we recommend the best Chrome security extensions to always keep us safe at all times. Fully compatible with any antivirus.
Clean Chrome
The Cleanup feature in Google Chrome allows users to find suspicious or unwanted files on their computer. Therefore, if we encounter this problem, we are going to use a Chrome Clean up computer tool that will be in charge of looking for malware and eliminating it.
- We open Google Chrome.
- We click on the three vertical points that are in the upper right part and choose Settings.
- Here we go to Reset and clean> Clean computer.
Chrome will start scanning our system looking for malware. If it finds suspicious files, it will ask us to confirm the deletion. So we proceed to click on Remove to complete the process. Once it’s done, we recommend restarting your computer.
Run a virus scan
As we discussed earlier, the main cause is malware infection on our PC. Therefore, we are going to have to scan our system with an excellent antivirus or antimalware. For free, Windows comes with Windows Defender, which is a pretty good antivirus and can fulfill this role without any problems.
Return to browser defaults
In case the problem is not solved, we recommend going back to the default settings that our browser had. This will restore all the settings to the default ones. So we will have to make several changes after restarting it if we had it too customized.
Remove any search engine
In case none of the above solutions will work. The only alternative left to us is to remove the search engines we don’t want to use. We can’t remove the default search engine, so we’re going to have to set the search engine we want to use by default and then proceed to remove the rest.
Firefox
- We click on the three horizontal lines at the top right and choose Settings.
- Now we are going to Search in the left sidebar.
- We scroll down and look for the Search Shortcuts section.
- We will have to select the search engine that we want to delete and we will click on Delete. In case the search engine is grayed out, it means that it is set as default, so we will have to change it.
Google Chrome
- We open the settings of Google Chrome.
- We choose Search engine on the left side.
- We scroll down until we find the Search Engines section.
- We click on the three vertical dots next to the search engine that we are going to remove and choose Delete. If we do not find the Delete option, it is because that engine is the default, so we will first change it to another.
microsoft edge
- We open Settings in the upper right corner.
- We choose Privacy, search and services in the left sidebar.
- Here we are going to have to click on the address bar at the bottom and on the search tab.
- Now we choose Manage search engines.
- We proceed to click on the three horizontal points next to the search engine that we want to eliminate and that’s it.
Change web browser
The last option we are left with is to switch to another web browser. While, Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge are the best browsers on the market. There are still many interesting alternatives to continue browsing the web.
