Homepage Hijack By Malwarebytes?

The first of the tabs in my home page tab set keeps getting changed from Dogpile to Google Search (although the other 3 tabs aren't affected). I believe I've seen this happen whenever I run Malwarebytes, but I'm not sure. If I'm right about this, it seems more than a little ironic that MB of all things would be causing this. Does anyone know anything about this?

 

I've been using MB for many years and it's never altered my home page/s or search engine.
Lots of free software will do that if the options boxes for such things are not unchecked.
You need to go into the settings of whatever web browser you use and look at what is set there.

 

Run a full system scan with MBAM. Pound to a penny it will throw up several PUPs, one of which will be causing your homepage change. Delete them all.

 

I looked at IE11 > Tools > Internet Options > Content, but the only things I saw there are Family Safety, Certificates, AutoComplete and Feeds and Web Slices. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?

 

It's in the first page view that comes up in internet options: 'GENERAL'.
But you should do what Earthling suggests.

 

Oddly enough, I DID run MB, and it found a bunch of PUPs, and I deleted them, and THAT is when tab #1 changed from Dogpile to Google Search.

The first entry was http://www.dogpile.com/ alright, not https://www.google.com/.

But I'm running MB again right now, we'll see what happens.

 

OK, MB just finished running, and I notice that the very first PUP it lists is PUP.Optional.DogPile. Should delete that one with all the rest or not?

 

For what it's worth, all the others (there's about 63 of them) are all named PUP.Optional.CrossRider.

 

Thanks for the tip, dr.moriarty. I can't say that I've noticed any viral behavior from Dogpile, because I chose it of my own free will (because I liked the fact that it's a metasearch engine and it seems to return a lot of relevant links). Plus, every time I discovered that Google Search had replaced Dogpile in my tab set, I would switch it back to Dogpile myself. But now that you've told me this, I'll give up Dogpile for Google.

 

Have a look at Ixquick if you need an alternative metasearch engine.
https://ixquick.com/

 

Thanks, Eldon. I've bookmarked it, and I'll try it.