Awesome Movies Search - How to remove

Awesome Movies Search is a browser extension that causes your search results to always be delivered in Yahoo.com. It can also display pop-up ads. These are not Awesome Movies Search’s official functions – it’s supposed to be an add-on for finding trailers of and news on movies and TV shows. However, that’s just the front for a search-hijacking program that wants to make money by showing you ads.

In short about the Awesome Movies Search hijacker:

Type of threat	Adware, browser hijacker.
Infection symptoms	Search results appear in Yahoo.com, sometimes the Gomovix.com site opens, you can’t change your search engine because Awesome Movies Search is in control of it.
How the hijacker is distributed	In adware bundles, by misleading ads.
How to remove Awesome Movies Search	Uninstall the extension manually, use anti-malware programs (like SpyHunter for Windows or Combo Cleaner for Mac OS) to remove malware.

What is Awesome Movies Search

Copied from Chrome Web Store’s description, Awesome Movies Search is this:

The easy and fun way to watch trailers, explore popular movies and TV shows.

But when you use Awesome Movies Search for its stated purpose of searching for movie-related material, all that happens is that a Gomovix website is opened. The sum total of Awesome Movies Search’s functionality is to redirect you to some website. And there are quite a few browser hijackers already that use Gomovix sites, such as MovieBox, iTheatre Search Plus, and Movie Browsing.

Awesome Movies Search gets installed and changes your default search settings to movies.awesomesearch.net, which has nothing to do with film trailers! Awesomesearch.net isn’t even a real search engine, and the website is not even secure, meaning that your search terms are not encrypted. The people behind Awesome Movies Search might use that chance to see what you’re searching for.

Obviously, Awesome Movies Search just uses that setting to hijack your search queries and forward them to Yahoo. This is common for browser hijackers to do. They can edit the results and inject ads, or they might have a totally legal partnership with another search engine. The problem is that Awesome Movies Search doesn’t give you the choice to choose your own default search engine despite its functionality not depending on it at all.

Also, this extension can also display pop-up ads in your browser.

Awesome Movies Search doesn’t get installed manually and most of its tens of thousands of users probably aren’t aware of it being on their computer in the first place. After all, when it’s installed, this hijacker makes very small changes – pop-up ads and your default search engine. Many people don’t know what a search engine is, what the differences between them are, or even  what a web browser is, so they might not realize that they’re being taken advantage of. Some malware developers think that their victims being uninformed makes it okay to trick and mislead them.

Dangers of using a browser hijacker

Awesome Movies Search can make your search terms take a while longer to load and it can mess up some searches. However, it’s not the worst malware out there. It (probably) doesn’t steal your passwords or try to rob your bank account. All it does is expose you to unwanted ads and let advertisers get a glimpse of what you like to search for, which helps them gauge your interests and allows them to show you the ads that are most likely to be effective on you. That’s called targeted advertising.

Besides threatening your online privacy, Awesome Movies Search might show you actually dangerous content. Some ads are so risky and potentially so harmful that they are not accepted in mainstream ad-networks to protect their users. But Awesome Movies Search is more open to them. In turn, it enables malicious actors to exploit it to spread their scams and malware. The cost paid by Awesome Movies Search’s users can be grave.

Awesome Movies Search spreads in a few different ways:

• using deceptive ads,
  • in streaming sites with pop-up ads that tell you that you need to install it in order to continue watching (you don’t),
  • fake messages that you need to install some software update,
  • or ads saying that you’ll be installing something else entirely,
• installed by an adware bundler.

Ads for malware are shown by adware infections on your computer and on websites with bad ads. Awesome Movies Search could also be installed together with an unrelated program that bundles and installed unwanted software – they get money for installing this additional software. And other browser hijackers, like Mega Games Search, Ultra Sports Search, and Gomovix, are distributed the same ways.

How to remove Awesome Movies Search

There are much safer and better ways to watch TV and film trailers than Awesome Movies Search. Remove this extension manually from your browser or allow an anti-malware program to do that for you (there’s SpyHunter for PC, Combo Cleaner for Mac, and others).

As long as there’s no malware keeping Awesome Movies Search installed or re-downloading it, manual remove should be good enough. But browser hijackers installed by adware and by malicious programs can be tricky to remove and might require tools.

If your browser is showing unwanted pop-ups, check out this article on how to disable web push notifications.

Automatic Malware removal tools

Manual removal instructions

TopHow To remove Awesome Movies Search from Google Chrome:

• Click on the 3 horizontal lines icon on a browser toolbar and Select More Tools→Extensions
  
• Select all malicious extensions and delete them.
  
• Click on the 3 horizontal lines icon on a browser toolbar and Select Settings
  
• Select Manage Search engines
  
• Remove unnecessary search engines from the list
  
• Go back to settings. On Startup choose Open blank page (you can remove undesired pages from the set pages link too).
• If your homepage was changed, click on Chrome menu on the top right corner, select Settings. Select Open a specific page or set of pages and click on Set pages.
  
• Delete malicious search websites at a new Startup pages window by clicking “X” next to them.
  

(Optional) Reset your browser’s settings

If you are still experiencing any issues related to Awesome Movies Search, reset the settings of your browser to its default settings.

• Click on a Chrome’s menu button (three horizontal lines) and select Settings.
• Scroll to the end of the page and click on theReset browser settings button.
  
• Click on the Reset button on the confirmation box.
  

If you cannot reset your browser settings and the problem persists, scan your system with an anti-malware program.

How To remove Awesome Movies Search from Firefox:Top

• Click on the menu button on the top right corner of a Mozilla window and select the “Add-ons” icon (Or press Ctrl+Shift+A on your keyboard).
  
• Go through Extensions and Addons list, remove everything Awesome Movies Search related and items you do not recognise. If you do not know the extension and it is not made by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Oracle or Adobe then you probably do not need it.
  
• If your homepage was changed, click on the Firefox menu in the top right corner, select Options → General. Enter a preferable URL to the homepage field and click Restore to Default.
  

(Optional) Reset your browser’s settings If you are still experiencing any issues related to Awesome Movies Search, reset the settings of your browser to its default settings.

• Click on the menu button on the top right corner of a Mozilla Firefox window. Click on the Help button.
  
• ChooseTroubleshooting Information on the Help menu.
  
• Click on theReset Firefox button.
  
• Click on the Reset Firefox button on the confirmation box. Mozilla Firefox will close and change the settings to default.
  

If the problem persists, scan your system with an anti-malware program to identify malicious entries.