Solving Mystery of Hacked Search Engines

[Delta]

Something strange is going on when I'm using search engines like google and yahoo.

At first my homepage was google, but it started to play up because it was coming up with elusive results. For one thing at the top when it shows found 50 of approximately 51,356, now the numbers are very round, e.g. showing 50 of approximately 21,900,000. I notice the sites found do not have the www. starter but are of the type http://sitename.com

I since changed my homepage to yahoo which was working fine, but now that is doing the same thing.

I can't find any dodgy files in the usual folder, ad-aware finds nothing, can't find anything unordinary in the registry or in the running processes. I've cleared my cookies and temporary files, etc.

Anyone got any ideas, where this ones lurking?

 

[franznietzsche]

I don't see any of that as a problem. For big numbers, they round off the totals. You're never going to search 200 million results by hand. (If you do, seek help immediately, the psychiatric kind). So the DNS is leaving off the www. Mostly does not matter(i can't think of a reason it would, but I'm sure there is some instance that it might). Sites like slashdot won't have it for me, others will. Hasn't caused any problems. All that you described occurrs when i do a vague search (many hits, and some sites not having www.). Being that I'm on Linux, I highly doubt its anything like adware or anything like that.