Word permanently in the search engine box.

[sllewk]

Good afternoon, today I have noticed the word laptops in lowercase letters in my search engine box, the cursor is in front of the 'L' and the whole word disappears once I type a letter in the box. My web page is Yahoo riding piggy-back on Safari. I have no idea as to where the word has come from or how. It has me completely foxed (but that is not difficult these days). Anyone got any ideas as to how or why? Could it cause any harm to my iMac? MalwareBytes shows 'clear' after a normal scan.

Very best regards from Keith in Derby England.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Does the word ever change? is it in a gray'ish color and you said it disappears when you type anything. If so, a lot of places will put "placeholder text" to give you an idea of what to enter and the format to enter it in. Once you start typing yourself, that placeholder text should disappear.

This shouldn't cause any problems for your machine as it is not malware.

 

[sllewk]

Hello Ashwin, The word does change because it now reads 'ISA Deadline' in Yahoo but still 'Laptops' on Firefox and yes it does disappear as soon as I start to type. Thank you for your reply, I have never come across this before - perhaps I have been lucky. I thought it might be malware of some sort, my mind is settled now.

Very best regards from Keith in Derby England.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Unless you are wedded to Yahoo (and you shouldn't be. ), you should try out DuckDuckGo as a no-tracking search engine and also give Brave a shot which helps additionally. I used be a long term Chrome user with Google. I switched to Brave and DuckDuckGo and don't have any extensions installed to block any bad stuff, it's all built into Brave.

 

[sllewk]

Ashwin, to me it is a long complicated story! First I do not know what you mean"Wedded to Yahoo"? Nearly all my email contacts are on yahoo where we have two different addresses; all our dealings and purchases are using a Yahoo email address. I do have both Firefox and Google Chrome (which I often fall out with and remove it). It all goes back to Windows of old with operating systems like win97 and XP, for a contact in NZ I have a Virgin Media email address. it would mean a lot of work to get rid of yahoo; even traders are linked to yahoo! By gum what a lot of work! I do not know how to change my browser's address in errrrr preferences? At least that is what I think is right? I am by the way not what you could call computer literate by the biggest stretch of the imagination. THICK AS TWO SHORT PLANKS glued and screwed to boot. I would welcome the point of using something other than Yahoo but do not know how (and when you have stopped laughing0 some help would be appreciated please.

Very best regards from Keith in Derby England.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

You can certainly stick with Yahoo for your email address, not suggesting that you make any changes there.

I use my GMail account as my primary and have no intentions of changing.

However, from a browser, searching, web perspective, I used to use Chrome and Google Search. Now I use Brave and DuckDuckGo.

In both Firefox and Chrome, you can use DuckDuckGo as your search engine. Open Chrome and go to Settings (CMD+,) and then on the left side, you will see the option for Search Engine, click on that and you will see a dropdown with a few options, Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Choose the latter.

I imagine Firefox is something similar.

Anyway, all of this is more a general thing, what I would love to know is WHERE you are seeing the search engine box and the text, so if you can take a screenshot of what you are seeing, we can tell if switching search engines is a good solution for you or if I'm just muddying the waters.

 

[sllewk]

Ashwin, sorry but I am now completely lost, muddying the waters is a gross understatement. Best left to struggle I feel!!! On reflection though I will attempt to leave Yahoo as a search engine and use Chrome. Thank you for all your assistance, I am most grateful.

Very best regards from Keith in Derby England.

 

[IWT]

Hullo Keith

I fully understand your difficulties regarding nomenclature - all these " do this" and " don't do that".

What Ashwin is saying is that you can stay with whatever Browser you wish - eg - Safari, Chrome, Firefox etc. He very reasonably suggests using Brave as your browser, but let's leave that for a moment.

In Safari - Apple's own - you can Click on the Safari icon in the top menu bar and, from the drop down, choose Preferences - or the keyboard shortcut is Command + comma.

When in Safari Preferences, Click on "Search" and the first option is Search Engine. Click on the triangle and this will lists the options, as in this screenshot:



Choose DuckDuckGo (Or, of course anything but Yahoo). NB This does NOT have anything to do with your email, so your Yahoo emails are not affected.

The advantage of DuckDuckGo is that it never tracks you're searches. On the other hand, in my opinion only, it is not as good as Google, but better than Yahoo.

If you prefer Firefox or Chrome, each has the option to change your Search Engine from Yahoo to any of the others mentioned.

For example in Chrome Preferences (same way as getting Safari Preferences), you will see this:



The same goes for Firefox.

Brave is another Browser - ie - competes with Safari, Chrome, Firefox and can be downloaded fro here: Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser

It also allows the choice of Search Engine.

Hope this helps, Keith

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

Let me step back a bit further, Keith. Just to make sure that the various terms and applications make sense to you.

Fundamentally, the Internet is a "place" where lots of companies and entities have "pages" that allow users to see, read, search, buy things. To get to those places, the user uses a piece of software called a "browser." Safari, Chrome, Brave, Firefox are all browsers and for the most part, they work similarly. You start the application and it goes to a page in the Internet that is set by the end user as the Homepage. From the homepage, the user goes to wherever they may want, either by typing in the address in the address bar, or clicking on a link that goes to that page.

Yahoo is a service in the Internet that has a page at yahoo.com. Yahoo provides email, plus it has a home web page. I think that is what you seeing when you use your browser to enter the internet.

What Ashwin suggested was that you move your homepage to something other than Yahoo.com, and that instead of using Yahoo as your search engine to find things in the internet that you shift to a search engine that does not track your every move like Yahoo does. DuckDuckGo is one such source. I use DDG myself and it works well.

For email, there are multiple email providers all around the world. Google supports Gmail. Yahoo has its own email. So does Apple with iCloud. Your internet service provider, the guy you pay for internet, may have its own email system. You use Yahoo, and that's fine, you can continue to do so and still change browser or homepage settings. I have used several email systems and now use a service that has a terrific spam filter to handle my email. So the email provider is different from the internet provider is different from the browser is different from the homepage is different from the search engine. The end user can play mix-and-match to get to the combination that best suits them.

Does that help clear some of the confusion? Or did I make it worse?