Strange Internet Search Problem

[loydclayton]

A friend called me with a peculiar problem. She cannot perform any searches in yahoo, msn, or google. When she types in any search info and clicks the search button, she gets a Page Not Found error. It appears to only be happening on these three search engines. She has no problem searching on webcrawler, metacrawler, or metagopher. She cannot even get to Google. When she types www.google.com in the address bar, she gets a Page Not Found error. At first I thought that maybe these pages were temporarily down, but this is not the case because I can bring them all up and perform searches on them on my computer.

[jlowmt]

The computer probably has Qhosts.Trojan. If you go to the Symantec website they have a removal tool (forgotten the url, but should be easy enough to find). After running it, the problem will most likely still persist, in which case there's still a HOSTS file in C:\windows\temp which needs to be renamed/deleted.

It has been floating around lately and prevents many users from reaching Google, MSN or Yahoo.

Also install all updates and patches from Microsoft, try running Ad-aware or similar spyware software.

[pooleks]

Maybe you can check the hosts file to see if the IP address has been blocked? Not sure if that's what it is, but I had problems accessing a site that ended up getting blocked in this manner somehow.

[glc]

Also, if it's WinXP, flush the local DNS cache. Open a command prompt and type:

ipconfig /flushdns