Welcome to our HightSearch removal instructions. This article intends to help you remove HightSearch from your system and is designed to work for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer and all Windows versions.

If your computer has been infected by HightSearch – we feel your pain. The annoying pop-ups, the banners plastered all over various websites, hindering your navigation, and those awful page redirects, that also seem to happen right when you least want them to. It’s all part of this piece of programing, known under its collective term as a browser hijacker.

There is a widespread misconception that this type of software is a virus or a kind of malware. In fact many people refer to it as hightsearch “virus”. This is in fact not correct, hightsearch is not a virus nor malware per se. Let us explain the crucial difference between the two. In the case with malware (viruses), these programs are designed to harm you and your machine and will do so, if they manage to infiltrate your system. When you hear the word ‘virus’ you should be thinking ransomware or Trojan Horse – those are viruses.

The browser hijacker, though, is fairly harmless in comparison to the above. As pointed out, its sole purpose is to create and distribute ads; however, it’s still not quite safe to let it stick around for long. We’ve designed the below guide to help you remove HightSearch from your computer and we will explain just why it’s important you do so.

How HightSearch.com operates

browser hijacker developers make their money based on the so called Pay per click scheme. Basically this means that every time you click on any of the displayed ads, the creators behind them make a profit. With that in mind, it should probably start making sense now, why the whole ad distribution is so aggressive. But in order for this whole master plan to be more effective, the developers aim to target users individually by gathering each user’s browsing-related data. This means that all of the websites you visit, along with the frequency you visit them, and all your search queries and even personal details are all collected and analyzed in order to produce adverts, which will be more relevant to you. The problem with this and also one of the reasons, why you would want to remove HightSearch from your PC immediately, is that this information of yours is very likely to be sold to third parties, which could choose to do with it whatever pleases them. At the ever-growing rate of identity theft these days – this should genuinely be reason for concern.

Other risks and how you could have gotten infected

Another thing the browser hijacker is particularly known and has a bad reputation for is the fact that the ads it generates are often fake. You might be looking at some particularly interesting offer on a product or service, which you would consider learning more about and possibly even purchasing, so you stop what you’re doing and click on the little box with the offer in it. And it brings you to a page that has remotely nothing to do with what you wanted to see. You might even be familiar with this already and felt deceived. And rightfully so – that’s exactly what this is. Only there’s a darker side to this, too. By clicking on one of these questionable advertisements, you could end up getting redirected to a page that not only does not correspond to what was in the ad, but is filled with viruses, which could enter your system at any given moment. Therefore it is crucial that you avoid clicking on any of the ads that plague your browser, while HightSearch is still on your computer. It’s too big of a risk and simply one not worth taking.

As for distribution, there is one technique so heavily exploited by hackers and browser hijacker developers alike, that it’s safe to say it’s the most common way of getting infected with a browser hijacker (and other unwanted programs). The technique we’re talking about is known as program bundling. It involves the process of packaging HightSearch (in this case) together with some other software, which you would normally want to download. So, when you have located a website (typically some shady open source download platform or torrent site), from which you can download the desired program, you proceed to do that and must finally install it, in order to be able to use it. So far so good, only when you reach the installation setup, you have two options: the default settings and the custom / advanced ones. By choosing the former you will be exposing yourself to whatever predetermined plan the developers have had without even knowing what it is. In the event that you choose the latter (custom settings), you will not only be able to see the bundled in software – you will also have the ability to decide whether or not you will let it get installed too.

HightSearch Chrome Removal

Reveal Hidden Files. If you don’t know how to do this, ask us in the comments.

Press  => Control Panel => Uninstall a program.

Locate the browser hijacker and any other suspicious looking programs and uninstall them.

Additional 2.1:

Sort the programs by Installed On.

Delete recent suspicious entries.

Additional 2.2:

In the search field type => msconfig => hit Enter.

Go to Startup and disable all entries with Unknown as Manufacturer.

 => Search=> Copy/Paste “notepad %windir%/system32/Drivers/etc/hosts” => Enter.

If you notice other IPs different from the localhost IPs – you might be in danger!

Ask for additional help in the comments.

HightSearch Removal from Chrome

Click => More Tools => Extensions.

Locate the browser hijacker and remove it.

HightSearch Removal from Firefox

Click  => Add-ons=> Extensions.

Locate the browser hijacker and delete it.

Removal from Internet Explorer

Press on  => Manage Add-ons =>

Find the browser hijacker and remove it.

Right click on the Taskbar => Start Task Manager.

Navigate to Processes.

Locate any suspicious processes associated with HightSearch. Right click on the process = > Open File Location => End Process = > Delete the directories with the suspicious files.

 => Search => Type:

• %AppData%
• %LocalAppData%
• %ProgramData%
• %WinDir%
• %Temp%

Hit Enter after each new search. Check each Folder and delete recent entries.

If you run into any trouble – ask us for help in the comments section!