It use to be that I could type in yahoo.com, or another address, without the www. prefix. Now when I do it, a bullshit search site comes up.

What happened and how can I fix it?

Damn porn screws up everything... the price you pay I suppose.

What you have to do is search your system for the HOSTS
file.

Once you've found it, open it with a text editor, you should find the first entry will be:


127.0.0.1 localhost


Knowing how those advertisers hijack systems they will have an entry somewhere within that file that will be an IP number and yahoo, i.e.


125.78.0.2 www.yahoo.com


Just delete that yahoo entry (including the IP number infront of it) and save the file, you should find from then on that your system will talk to your ISP to resolve the Domain name into it's IP form rather than take it straight from this file on your system.

I found the hosts files, there were like two, and they only had a few websites on them. The IPs were there along with the names, but they were like msn search shit and thehun.com (wtf?).

Anyways, I tried going to msn.com, one of the sites I deleted off the host and it still went to this:

http://search.xrenoder.com/?trk=msn.com

I've tried to block the xrendoer thing, but it doesn't fix the problem.

Obviously I can surf the web by using www. but its more convient to not use it.

Any more suggestions?

If you are using IE6.0, you can goto IE->Tools->Internet Options->Advanced tab, then to the "Search from the Address bar" section, then select "Do not search from the address bar" option.

Or you can download Spybot S&D. It allows you to re-configure the default search engine URL inside IE. Some web sites can hi-jack it with its own serach URL.