Anchorfree.net hijacker - How to remove

search.anchorfree.net is one of the search pages used by HotSpot shield. It claims to provide better search privacy, however it is not true. The search results on the page are powered by third party – ask.com which is one of the older and less used search engines, so HotSpot shield can not ensure how your search data will be used and won’t hide more detais from ask.com than from other engines like Google or Bing. This rates search.anchorfree.net search as Potenially unwanted.
Ask.com is known for heavy and aggressive promotions in the past, typically run by third parties. Thus we can suspect some sort of monetary gain for changing the search providers and not creating useful and private service. As there is no privacy gain, I recommend changing you Search engines to your regular one.
For fixing the search engines and removing anchorfree.net search, you should uninstall HotSpotShield toolbar. Then reset search engines in each browser separately.
On Internet explorer:
1. Click arrow on the right of search box
2. Do following: On IE8-9 choose Manage Search providers, On ie7 click change search defaults
3. Remove the unnecessary search engines from the list

On Firefox :
1. Enter “about:config” in url bar. This will open settings page
2. Type “Keyword.url” in the search box. Right click it & reset it.
3. Type “browser.search.defaultengine” in the search box. Right click it & reset it.
4. Type “browser.search.selectedengine” in the search box. Right click it & reset it.
5. Search for ‘browser.newtab.url’. Right-click and reset. This will make sure that the search page won’t launch on each new tab.

On Google Chrome:
1. Click 3 horizontal lines icon on browser toolbar
2. Select Settings
3. Select Basics ->Manage Search engines
4. Remove unnecessary search engines from list
5. Go back to settings. On Startup choose open blank page ( you can remove undesired pages from the set pages link too).

Lastly, in some cases these domains are promoted with help of malware. If you fail to reset search providers or the search reverts to search.anchorfree.net, scan with spyhunter or Hitman Pro to eliminate possibility of infection.

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