This page shows how to remove www.fast-search.info from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
Did you just see www.fast-search.info in the status bar of your web browser and ask yourself where it came from? Or did www.fast-search.info show up while you searched for something on one of the major search engines, such as the Google.com search engine?
In my case, I noticed fast-search in the status bar when I typed in a Google search in Firefox’ search toolbar.
The following are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s status bar:
- Waiting for www.fast-search.info…
- Transferring data from www.fast-search.info…
- Looking up www.fast-search.info…
- Read www.fast-search.info
- Connected to www.fast-search.info…
If you also see this on your computer, you presumably have some potentially unwanted program installed on your computer that makes the www.fast-search.info domain appear in your browser. So there’s no use contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The www.fast-search.info status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the www.fast-search.info removal in this blog post.
Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and wilfully installed some potentially unwanted programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the actions on these machines to see what kinds of advertisements, if any, that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the potentially unwanted program updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional software on the computers. I first found www.fast-search.info in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab machines.
fast-search.info resolves to the 87.106.89.171 IP address and so does the www.fast-search.info domain. www.fast-search.info was created on 2015-05-05.
So, how do you remove www.fast-search.info from your browser? On the machine where www.fast-search.info showed up in the status bar I had WebShield, mystartsearch, Wajam, PhaseProfessor, FastSearch, PrimaryColor, SSFK.exe, SFKEX64.exe, YTDownloader and acengine installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from www.fast-search.info.
The bad news with status bar messages like the one described in this blog post is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.
To remove www.fast-search.info you need to check your computer for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:
The first thing I would do to remove www.fast-search.info is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows OS you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:
Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:
Do you see something suspicious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started getting the www.fast-search.info status bar messages.
Then you can examine you web browser add-ons. Potentially unwanted programs often appear under the add-ons menu in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?
I think you will be able to track down and remove the potentially unwanted program with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’ve developed since 2006. It’s a tool built to manually find and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.
FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It will not require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.
And if you’re having problems deciding if a file is clean or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:
Did this blog post help you to remove www.fast-search.info? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.
Thank you!