Default web search engine

Default web search engine

• Pranav joshi

  This look-up-results.com search apparently comes up with many flavors, with many subdomains in front of it ranging from wwwa to www2 and www3, and I guess even 2www2, from what I found in a "look-up-results.com" search in quotes on Google.

  Last year, or maybe it was two years ago now, I had a Windows Me installation that was afflicted with the problem, which, even though I told Internet Explorer to not search from the address bar, and had Google set as my default search engine, I had a redirect to www2.look-up-results.com any time I put in a nonexistent site.

  I spent three months with a tech over in the TomCoyote Forum, running HijackThis and posting the resulting log, running Spybot, AdAware, Trojan Hunter, various and sundry vbs scripts designed to search for regisry entries, etc. I of course ran my antivirus and kept it up to current, and also ran the Microsoft anti-spyware tool.

  I was told I had a poisoned DNS server that was performing the redirect, that my ISP was responsible. We coulkd find nothing on my machine.

  I spoke with my ISP and their tech said it was something on my machine, that they don't perform such a service. I emailed my domain name registrar and he said the same thing, that it is not my ISP. I was asking him if I could use one of his dns servers to see if I saw anything different.

  I solved the problem eventually by running a Windows XP upgrade on my Windows ME computer.

  I recently replaced that Windows XP upgrade with a fresh install of XP, now running NTFS file system for the first time. In reinstalling software along the way, I had to go visit some download sites on the Internet and get WinZip and FileZilla, and I also put Bugnosis on here, which alerts me of when web sites place small hidden images from another site in their page, for tracking purposes. Download.com is one such site that Bugnosis alerts me to.

  Somewhere along that process, I have encountered this look-up-results.com bugger again.

  I have taken to placing this entry in my hosts file:

  127.0.0.1 [TAB keypress] www2.look-up-results.com

  You would enter your variant of look-up-results.com. This does not solve the redirect, that still takes place, but now I get a "Page cannot be displayed" message instead of a visit to this search site.

  I have created a shortcut on my desktop to open my hosts file in my Notepad replacement text editor. The shortcut's command line is as follows:

  C:\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.EXE C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

  Hosts is a text file with no extension (I don't hide known file extensions, a Windows default that I always uncheck).

  A Google search this morning for "look-up-results.com" shows some forum threads of other people experiencing this problem and some ISP being accused of providing this service to reduce the number of "404 error" tech support calls. From my experience, it is not the fault of the ISP, but nothing I have found yet explains how this process takes place.

  One other thing: My Firefox browser and any other brand browsers are similarly affected.
  
  

  
  

• JaredJ

  Hello,

  I get also the same problem, whan I make a search in IE7 It uses corectly live search, but when I want to make a search on the web with WDS3, it takes me to a web page with this url: http:/// %20essai.

  I tried to define google for default, and it is the same behavior as above.

  Do you have an idea

  Regards

  
  
  

• velibicer

  Sorry for the late reply, but I think I found it, with Mcafee's assistance.

  Part of the problem is trying to find anything using the entire name. It appears it changes the www part of the name to several names, so you can try searching under "look-up-results.com". I didn't find anything there, but I did note that Google (when clicking the HOME button) will come up... but won't display the results a second time.

  My updates expired from Mcafee, so perhaps they disabled their protection. In any case, the virus search found the file rabbit1.exe in "My Downloads" on my PC. I had to boot to DOS (WIN98 SE) in order to remove this file. I also put in a line to disable this in my HOSTS file (another post here) and I occasionally get a MS link that's disabled, showing in the browser, but the system usually jumps to my mapped Google search page.

  I'm not positive rabbit1.exe is the cause, but it seems a good case study. There are hundreds of pages showing up for "joke" and it is a noted malware vendor's product... known as "scumware" in the UK. I think that title is more appropriate for these vendors.

  It's unknow if they search your HD, but they certainly log every time you make a search using their product, and will steer you towards their search results. If rumor is true, they don't use Yahoo search, though they list it on their page.

  Once again, I'm not positive this is the full solution. It may be that Mcafee removed something w/o telling me, but it seems to be the culprit. I have not yet found how this exe is executed by the system. It's not in the INI files I searched, in the registry startup (or in the section I searched)... so it's possible another file is launching it.

  
  

• zoomer

  Hello Kaiservunderbar,

  WDS uses the default search service that you've chosen in Internet Explorer (IE). If you like to change your default search service you can do the following. Open IE and click on View:Explorer Bar: Search. Once there you can select your default search service from the list.

  It also sounds like you may have some adware or spyware that is setting your default search service to the wwwa.look-up-results.com engine. If this is the case, the steps above may not change your default search service (the adware will just change your choices back to the look-up engine). If this happens I would suggest asking your question here:

  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/support/newsgroups/default.mspx

  Paul Nystrom - MSFT

  
  
  

• dermothogan

  This look-up-results.com search apparently comes up with many flavors, with many subdomains in front of it ranging from wwwa to www2 and www3, and I guess even 2www2, from what I found in a "look-up-results.com" search in quotes on Google.

  Last year, or maybe it was two years ago now, I had a Windows Me installation that was afflicted with the problem, which, even though I told Internet Explorer to not search from the address bar, and had Google set as my default search engine, I had a redirect to www2.look-up-results.com any time I put in a nonexistent site.

  I spent three months with a tech over in the TomCoyote Forum, running HijackThis and posting the resulting log, running Spybot, AdAware, Trojan Hunter, various and sundry vbs scripts designed to search for regisry entries, etc. I of course ran my antivirus and kept it up to current, and also ran the Microsoft anti-spyware tool.

  I was told I had a poisoned DNS server that was performing the redirect, that my ISP was responsible. We coulkd find nothing on my machine.

  I spoke with my ISP and their tech said it was something on my machine, that they don't perform such a service. I emailed my domain name registrar and he said the same thing, that it is not my ISP. I was asking him if I could use one of his dns servers to see if I saw anything different.

  I solved the problem eventually by running a Windows XP upgrade on my Windows ME computer.

  I recently replaced that Windows XP upgrade with a fresh install of XP, now running NTFS file system for the first time. In reinstalling software along the way, I had to go visit some download sites on the Internet and get WinZip and FileZilla, and I also put Bugnosis on here, which alerts me of when web sites place small hidden images from another site in their page, for tracking purposes. Download.com is one such site that Bugnosis alerts me to.

  Somewhere along that process, I have encountered this look-up-results.com bugger again.

  I have taken to placing this entry in my hosts file:

  127.0.0.1 [TAB keypress] www2.look-up-results.com

  You would enter your variant of look-up-results.com. This does not solve the redirect, that still takes place, but now I get a "Page cannot be displayed" message instead of a visit to this search site.

  I have created a shortcut on my desktop to open my hosts file in my Notepad replacement text editor. The shortcut's command line is as follows:

  C:\WINDOWS\NOTEPAD.EXE C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

  Hosts is a text file with no extension (I don't hide known file extensions, a Windows default that I always uncheck).

  A Google search this morning for "look-up-results.com" shows some forum threads of other people experiencing this problem and some ISP being accused of providing this service to reduce the number of "404 error" tech support calls. From my experience, it is not the fault of the ISP, but nothing I have found yet explains how this process takes place.

  One other thing: My Firefox browser and any other brand browsers are similarly affected.
  
  

  
  

• oyvindk

  Thanks for the replies. I had completely forgotten about this post and only got a reminder that you answered it this morning. I had no idea about the previous posts on this. I remember that I finally uninstalled the desktop search and reinstalled it. I did run windows defender and although it did not find anything once I reinstalled the desktop search it went back to using Google as per my setting in IE options. about the ISP with the poisoned DNS , if you went to a web page and put google in the address , you would expect to be redirected to the look-up sites , correct I mean the desktop search would make the call to find where google.com was and the poisoned DNS would send you to look-up.com. I did not experience this, google always loaded when being accessed directly from IE. It was the desktop search that did the redirection to look-up

  Regards

  Kaiser

  
  
• Default web search engine