Accessible Search Engine Mac

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Accessible Search Engine

Accessible Search Engine is an ad-generating program that targets Mac computers and fills the screen of their browsers with pop-ups ads and page-redirect prompts. From a security point of view, Accessible Search Engine is considered a browser hijacker that can adjust your browser’s settings to accommodate aggressive advertising strategies.

The Accessible Search Engine Malware on Mac

In contrast to what they are looking for, the web users who have Accessible Search Engine on their Mac may often experience unwanted redirects of their browser searches to various sponsored websites, sales platforms, and unfamiliar domains. Other common symptoms of the presence of browser hijackers may involve covering the computer’s screen with hard-to-remove pop-ups, banner ads and other types of commercial messages. A change in the browser’s homepage or the main search engine is also possible, as this is one of the ways to automatically reroute user searches to some pre-determined pages. These unwanted symptoms may have led you to seek out a way to uninstall Accessible Search Engine from your Safari, Chrome or Firefox browser. If this is the case, the removal guide below is just for you.

Accessible Search Engine for Mac

Accessible Search Engine for Mac is a browser-hijacking program designed to hijack and change the settings of your default Mac browser. Accessible Search Engine for Mac typically modifies your browser’s regular homepage and search engine and sets new ones that generate sponsored content.

As you might have noted, you can’t remove those adjustments or uninstall the newly imposed components regardless of what you do. This is a common problem that many web users are faced with. In fact, some people quickly conclude that they must have been infected with a virus or some malware from the Trojan or Ransomware class since they fail to get rid of the hijacker on their own. To your relief, however, Accessible Search Engine, Function LoginputExtensionInstallForcelist are not programs that aims to harm your Mac computer. Тheir only purpose is to advertise.

What is Accessible Search Engine?

Accessible Search Engine is an application for Mac browsers, designed to aggressively promote certain web services, products, and web pages by displaying them on the browser’s screen. Every time users click on some of the displayed promotional messages, a small pay-per-click revenue is generated for the developers of the browser hijacker. At the same time, the advertised page or product gains more exposure which is the ultimate goal of the advertisers who use such software.

The AccessibleSearchEngine app

The AccessibleSearchEngine app is a non-malicious application that uses aggressive online advertising tactics to land web users on particular websites. From a software point of view, the AccessibleSearchEngine app is technically not a virus, yet its sponsored ads and redirects can lead you to insecure web locations.

That is why most security experts advise web users to uninstall the browser hijacker as a preventive measure. Moreover,  trusting randomly displayed pop-up ads, banners and links is not the best idea provided that threats like Ransomware and Trojans may be just one click away. That’s why we recommend that you avoid interacting with any advertisements or links that Accessible Search Engine or other browser hijackers display on your screen and use the instructions in the removal guide below to permanently eliminate them.

SUMMARY:

NameAccessible Search Engine
TypeAdware/Browser Hijacker
Detection Tool

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Remove Accessible Search Engine from Mac

To remove Accessible Search Engine from Mac, you have to start with checking for apps that have most likely brought the hijacker into the system and remove them.

  1. You can see a list of all apps you have installed on your Mac in Finder >>> Applications.
  2. Once you get there, search for recently installed apps that seem potentially unwanted or have questionable developers.
  3. If you spot an app that could be related to the hijacker, delete it by dragging it to the Trash Bin on your Desktop. This will hopefully remove Accessible Search Engine from your Mac as well.
  4. Next, empty the Trash bin to fully remove it from the system. 
  5. Restart your Mac computer and see if you still notice any signs of Accessible Search Engine after a while.

In some cases, removing the rogue app that delivered Accessible Search Engine may not be enough to fully rid you of the intrusive browser hijacker. Therefore if after you restart the computer, open Safari, you still see symptoms of Accessible Search Engine, you need to use the more detailed guide below and complete its steps to remove the browser hijacker completely.

Advanced Removal Steps

Step 1: Find the Accessible Search Engine process and quit it

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Quitting the Accessible Search Engine process (or processes) is the first step towards the successful removal of the browser hijacker from your Mac. To do this, open Finder > Applications > Utilities and launch the Activity Monitor app.

Carefully search the list of processes that you see and try to find a process named Accessible Search Engine or one that seems to be operated by the hijacker. If you detect processes with unusual and strange names or ones that are using a lot of CPU, battery life, and RAM research them online to find out if they are linked to Accessible Search Engine and need to be stopped.

Once you have detected a process that you are sure needs to be stopped, highlight it, click on the X button in the top-left, and then click on Quit in the dialog box that pops up.

In case you are not sure whether you should stop a given process, here is what you can do: 

Select the process in question, click on the (i) button at the top of the Activity Monitor window, and in the Information window that appers select Sample.

A sample file of the selected process will be created that should look like this:

Save that file and then scan it with the free malware scanner available below:

Each file will be scanned with up to 64 antivirus programs to ensure maximum accuracy
This scanner is free and will always remain free for our website's users.
This file is not matched with any known malware in the database. You can either do a full real-time scan of the file or skip it to upload a new file. Doing a full scan with 64 antivirus programs can take up to 3-4 minutes per file.
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Each file will be scanned with up to 64 antivirus programs to ensure maximum accuracy
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    If the scanner detects dangerous code in the sample file or relation to Accessible Search Engine, then you need to quit the process that was sampled from the Activity Monitor. 

    Step 2: Remove the Accessible Search Engine app

    WARNING! READ CAREFULLY BEFORE PROCEEDING!

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    Before you move on with the instructions in this guide, It is highly recommended that you check the Applications folder of your Mac for potentially unwanted apps that might have something to do with Accessible Search Engine once again. If some of the apps you tried to delete with the initial instructions above have made their way back into the system, drag them to the trash again. Apply the same for any applications that you couldn’t delete earlier because they wouldn’t get removed when you tried to delete them. Finally, to complete the removal of the unwanted programs, empty the Trash bin.

    Step 3: Safe Launch Safari

    Quit Safari if it is currently open and perform a safe-launch in the following way:

    Hold down Shift from your keyboard and keep it pressed down while you are opening the browser. This should stop any pages promoted by Accessible Search Engine to load on the screen.  If any such sites/pages do load automatically when Safari starts, quit the browser, switch off your Internet connection, and try to shift-launch it once again.

    You can temporarily disconnect from the Internet by either removing the Ethernet cable from the computer or by turning OFF the Wi-Fi from the Mac menu bar.

    Step 4: Uninstall Accessible Search Engine from Safari

    To uninstall Accessible Search Engine from Safari, you need to remove all potentially unwanted extensions related to the hijacker that are found in the browser and do a browser reset:

    1. Go to the Safari menu and then select Extensions.
    2. Once you find yourself on the Extensions page, search for extensions that haven’t been installed by you in the browser or look related to Accessible Search Engine.
    3. Delete these extensions in order to uninstall Accessible Search Engine from Safari.
    4. After that, restart your Mac, launch Safari, and use it for a while to see how it operates now. 

    Once the rogue extensions added to your browser by the hijacker have been dealt with, the next thing is to revoke any changes made in Safari by Accessible Search Engine.

    For that,  click on Safari menu >>> Preferences and select the Privacy tab. Find a button named Remove All Website Data and click it. Confirm the command by selecting Remove Now. This action removes all cache, cookies, and other temporary data that may contain information about Accessible Search Engine.

    Next, visit the General section of the Preferences menu and check the URL in the Homepage field. 

    If the address there seems to be imposed by Accessible Search Engine, remove it and type a reputable website that will be the new homepage of Safari. 

    Clearing the history of your browsing is another important step. For that click the History menu of Safari, and go to Clear History. We recommend clearing All History to remove all traces of Accessible Search Engine and its sites. Just complete the action by selecting the Clear History button from the dialog box.

    Step 5: Check your other browsers

    Accessible Search Engine may hijack any browsers in your system, not just Safari, thus, if you have other browsers you need to check them for hijacker elements.

    Removing Accessible Search Engine from Firefox:

    Click on the Firefox menu icon and open Add-ons from the sile-down options. Click on the extensions icon on the left and remove any potentially unwanted extensions from the browser. There could be the same as those that you have removed from Safari or some other ones that look suspicious.

    After you are done with that, reset the Firefox settings by completing the instructions from this link. 

    Removing ads from Chrome for Mac:

    Click on the Google Chrome main menu icon under the button, select More Tools, and click on Extensions from the left. Once you see the Extensions page do the same as you did in the other browsers and uninstall any extensions that could have been added to the browser by Accessible Search Engine.

    Again from the Chrome main menu, select Settings >>> Search Engines (the button to the left) and click the Manage Search Engines option. Look through the list of search engines there and remove those that you are not familiar with by clicking on the three dots icon to its right and then on “Remove from list”.

    The last thing is to reset the browser settings of Chrome. Just follow this link, and its instructions will explain to you how to do that.

    In case that the steps presented here cannot remove Accessible Search Engine from your Mac completely, know that you can turn to the professional removal tool linked on this page, scan your Mac with it and delete any remnants of the hijacker. And last but not least, do not hesitate to ask us any questions that you may have in the comments down below. Our team will try to get back to you as soon as possible.


    About the author

    Lidia Howler

    Lidia is a web content creator with years of experience in the cyber-security sector. She helps readers with articles on malware removal and online security. Her strive for simplicity and well-researched information provides users with easy-to-follow It-related tips and step-by-step tutorials.

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