Search.searchetan.com

If you find Search.searchetan.com in your browsers upon launch, you can be quite sure that your system is under attack by a number of malware infections. First and foremost, you have been infected with a browser hijacker that changes your home page setting in your affected browsers, including Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox. But since this hijacker mainly spreads on the web in freeware bundles, there is a high likelihood that you have let other threats sneak onto your machine when you installed this search engine even if unknowingly. Such a browser hijacker may introduce you to unreliable third-party web content through its search results as well as through its provided linked pages. The result of clicking on content coming through this infection could be more infections on board or much worse. This is why we do not advise you to engage with this search engine in any way. In fact, we suggest that you remove Search.searchetan.com ASAP. However, if you want to be a security-minded user, we also advise you to detect all other possibly unsafe programs and eliminate them one by one or use an automated solution to do this for you.

In order for you to let such a malware infection like this one on board, you need to click on corrupt third-party content. Although it is essential that you are always cautious whenever going online and visiting websites because you could be exposed to third-party contents practically on all kinds of websites nowadays, it gets even worse when your computer is actually infected with an ad-supported program or a browser hijacker. If you have noticed a great number of ads while surfing, it is quite likely that your system is infected unless you keep visiting suspicious file-sharing, online gaming, gambling, and porn sites and that is why the constant flow of ads. These pages are infamous for promoting shady content that can drop malicious bundles onto your PC. If this ever happens to you, it is important that you run a malware scanner to identify all possible threats. But in this case we can help you with the first step, which is the removal of Search.searchetan.com as one of the most likely infections you are facing right now.

We suggest that you only download programs from official sources because otherwise there is no guarantee of reliability. In fact, even official pages could be created by schemers in an attempt to spread their useless installers that could also bundle browser hijackers, adware apps, Trojans, and other malware infections. This is why you should always double-check the application you are about to download by running a quick web search; it can be quite revealing when you find that a whole results page is full of links leading to pages explaining how and why you need to delete Search.searchetan.com or any other tool targeted by you.

You may easily spot and identify this browser hijacker because of its fake toolbar, which contains a search tool and several buttons leading to websites associated with online TV (e.g., Netflix and Hulu), news, and local weather. These pages may be reliable themselves but this hijacker may inject its third-party ads into them and thus make them potentially risky. The two most unreliable buttons are definitely the first two from the left, i.e., the TVNews and the Local Weather buttons. These redirect you to respective widget pages that are filled with potentially harmful third-party ads. There is yet another News button that leads to news.mynewswire.co, which again hosts a great number of ads. This already could be enough for you to want to delete Search.searchetan.com from your computer. But this is not even the end of the list.

This browser hijacker may spy on you and gather information about you related to your browsing habits. This information then can be shared with third parties so that tailored content can be served to you. However, this can easily be exploited by cyber criminals to promote their highly questionable websites. This is why we advise you against using this search engine because its search results may contain unreliable third-party ads and links even though you are redirected to a Yahoo search results page. If you do not wish to fall prey to crooks and lose money, we suggest that you take the necessary steps to remove Search.searchetan.com from your computer.

Our tests and research both indicate that this browser hijacker may only hijack your home page settings. Therefore, it should be enough to only recover those. If you are not familiar with this process, you can use our instructions below as a reference. We suggest that you do not stop after eliminating this infection. There is a good chance that you will find several other threats on board. If you do not wish to detect all of these manually, which could be hard for even advanced users, we recommend that you install a decent anti-malware program that will automatically take care of all possible malware attacks, present and future ones, too.

Remove Search.searchetan.com from your browsers

Mozilla Firefox

1. Press Win+E and open “%AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{Unique Mozilla user ID}” folder.
2. Edit the file called prefs.js in Notepad.
3. Change the URL address in the user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://search.searchetan.com/") string to a URL address you prefer.

Google Chrome

1. Press Win+E and open “%LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default” folder.
2. Delete Preferences, Secure Preferences, and Web Data files.
3. Empty your Recycle Bin

Internet Explorer

1. Press Win+Q and type regedit. Hit Enter.
   
2. Change the value data of “http://search.searchetan.com” in the following registry keys:
   HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Start Page (64-bit)
   HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Start Page
   HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Start Page
3. Open “HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchScopes\{0633EE93-D776-472f-A0FF-E1416B8B2E3A}” registry key and change the value data in these value names:
   FaviconURL (“http://search.searchetan.com/favicon.ico”)
   FaviconURLFallback (“http://search.searchetan.com/favicon.ico”)
   TopResultURL (“http://search.searchetan.com”)
   URL (“http://search.searchetan.com”)
4. Exit your Registry Editor.