hijacked default search engine in Safari

[DavidVC]

Sorry to bring back an old topic but we just faced this issue on a Mac today. No matter what we did, searches were running on Yahoo and not the search engine set in the prefs. Interestingly, if the search engine was set to something other than Google, it would work! I was pulling my hair out and took a stab at something I read online in some searches that suggested it was a bad "hosts" file. 

I found a page which claimed to have the right Hosts file syntax so I made one and replaced the Hosts file, sure enough, that worked!

I wonder if some of you wizards here can explain this and/or post the right contents of a clean Hosts file.

Thank you.

[AdvancedSetup]

A hosts file is not mandatory. The system can and should work normally even if you don't have one.

It's useful for purposefully redirecting a URL to a specific destination which may be different than the Internet DNS resolves to.

 

[DavidVC]

20 hours ago, AdvancedSetup said:

A hosts file is not mandatory. The system can and should work normally even if you don't have one.

It's useful for purposefully redirecting a URL to a specific destination which may be different than the Internet DNS resolves to.

 

So would one possible remedy have been to simply delete the "bad" Hosts file and let the computer re-create it by itself?

[AdvancedSetup]

Yes, if the file was bad you could delete but normally one simply edits the file.

The computer will not auto recreate the file though.