Norton Safe Search is being hijacked by Yahoo Search. I have been online with chat twice and their only suggestion is to change search engine default to Google. Not a good answer. Has anyone found a real solution to this problem? I did run NPE basic to see if it would discover a PUP malware. It did not. I have also disabled Norton Safe Search extension and then reenabled it. Did not help. Thank you for any advice or solutions that you may have.
Norton 360 Premium 1
Win 10
SoulAsylum:Change your DEFAULT to Google in your settings. I run Opera GX with Chrome extensions, those are my settings. You will still see your green checks when searches are done. FWIW!! Doing searches from "https://search.norton.com/" for me doesn't invoke Yahoo in any of my searches....
Further to my comment <above>, Google is the current default search engine in my Firefox v85.0.2 browser (Tools | Options | Search | Default Search Engine) ...
...and if I search from the Norton Safe Search webpage at https://search.norton.com/ ...
... the search uses the Ask.com search engine. I live in Canada so someone located in a different region might see the search run with the Yahoo search engine.
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64-bit Win 10 Pro v2004 build 19041.746 * Firefox v85.0.2 * Windows Defender v4.18.2011.6
Dell Inspiron 15 5584, Intel i5-8265U CPU, 8 GB RAM, Toshiba 256 GB NVMe SSD, Intel UHD Graphics 620
Hi vette-guy:
See ter board's 04-Jan-2021 thread Yahoo Highjacks My Firefox. Any Suggestions? for a recent discussion on this topic.
Depending on your geographic location, either Yahoo or Ask.com are the official search partners for Norton Safe Search, and when you search with Norton Safe Search the search is actually processed by one of those two search engines. As xjoex noted, that is by design, and as far as I know you can't change the search engine that Norton Safe Search uses.
From the Norton Safe Search product page at https://us.norton.com/safe-search under the section titled "I’m concerned about data privacy. If I use Norton Safe Search, will my information be provided to anyone else?":
"When you submit a search query through Norton Safe Search, it will be directed to Ask.com or Yahoo.com (Search Partners) where your query is processed, and the search results are provided. Norton Safe Search does not provide any information about you to our Search Partners. As part of your use of Norton Safe Search, Search Partners may collect and/or ask you to provide certain information. Please see the Search Partners Privacy Policies located here for Ask.com and here for Yahoo.com for details on the type of information collected, how our Search Partners uses and protects the collected information, and who it may share such information with."
Change your DEFAULT to Google in your settings. I run Opera GX with Chrome extensions, those are my settings. You will still see your green checks when searches are done. FWIW!! Doing searches from "https://search.norton.com/" for me doesn't invoke Yahoo in any of my searches. Clear your entire history, cookies and cache then restart your browser. Lets see if that changes things.
SA
It is not a hijack but rather by design from Norton. They use Yahoo and not Google.