Crawler.com hijacked my browser
After installing an app last weekend I've had Crawler.com hijack my browser to be my default search engine. I didn't tell Crawler.com to do that so I'm pretty pissed off with them and every attempt to uninstall the damned search engine has failed.The hijack doesn't appear to have had a massive effect on boosting their brand awareness except, in my case, in a very negative way. I know Alexa isn't the perfect guage of site usage, but a quick squint at the traffic details for crawler.com shows that their rank and page views have increased but that their reach has gone down. It should all be going down for their cynical installation strategy.
So how do you remove Crawler.com from Firefox?
Well, after a quick search on the web, using Google.co.uk, I found that in Firefox you need to do the following:
In the address bar enter about:config
Look for the following entries as these were the ones that had been hijacked on my Firefox:
browser.search.defaultenginename
browser.search.order.1
My entries here were Crawler Search so I changed them to Google.co.uk
Bugger! That didn't work. What was I missing? I searched through the settings and figured that all the ones in BOLD were user defined, so I ran through just those one s and found:
keyword.URL
THIS was the last setting to still have Crawler in it, so I right-clicked the entry and selected the last option: RESET.
That cured my Crawler hijack problem. Good riddance.
