Searchokay Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Searchokay pop-up advertisements appear when you do not expect, distracting and annoying you. However, they are slightly more than simple pop-up ads – their nature is clearly malignant, and they can introduce other malware to your PC. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Searchokay pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Searchokay pop-ups will be useless at best. At worst, the sites it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications may also advertise fake shopping websites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Searchokay manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Gridinsoft Anti-Malware 6-day trial available.
EULA | Privacy Policy | 10% Off Coupon

What are Searchokay pop-ups?

As the pop-up definition goes, these are short and small advertisements that attract your attention to a product they promote. But the difference between regular pop-up advertisements and Searchokay notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Common pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – notify you about the new posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to retain visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Searchokay.com pop-ups:

Searchokay pop-up notifications, on the other hand, have a deal with untrustworthy web pages. You will generally witness the offer to enable them following the redirection from another website. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a questionable place. In this case, enabling pop-ups is offered as the anti-bot check-up. In other cases, the sites may refuse to show you the contents unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These demands should already raise suspicion, as sites commonly have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an requirement should be the reason to skip the page right away. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

Searchokay push notification.

How does it work?

Most of browsers support turning on push notifications from sites. Websites, on the other hand, can send out notifications with the content of their choice. It may be an advertisement of the product published on this particular site, as well as a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but interacting with it will direct you to website Y – because a referral link to the latter was added.

Scoundrels bear on this feature in their approach to earn money through advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and after that just spread numerous banners of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Searchokay popups you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same user can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming sites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible pay for one person, but when you have hundreds of users and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of these banners are ineffective, it may still give all the parties a lot of money.

Are Searchokay pop-up ads dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look harmless – just a blinking pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ drastically from what you used to see in push notifications. Searchokay.com site is controlled by crooks, who deliberately throw hundreds of malicious ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can make sporadic pop-up notifications into a storm of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Searchokay pop-up ads lack legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the website these banners will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may offer you to turn on other pop-ups, install a “useful” program, or pay for a thing at a big discount and never receive it. Let’s leave aside the cases when pop-ups promote phishing pages or straightforward malware. There’s no way these pages will bring you any good, thus interacting with them is a very bad idea. For the same reason, Searchokay pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Searchokay pop-ups?

Fortunately, Searchokay pop-ups removal is pretty easy. They sit in the browser and can’t conceal themselves in the system. Nevertheless, as I stated before, some pop-up advertisements can promote malicious software to your computer. It is hard to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. Therefore, after disabling the pop-up ads the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that if you have never allowed push notifications, but they still appeared. That can point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware scanning purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-component detection system.

Initially, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in both manual and automatic manner. The former, obviously, requires more time to complete and can be somewhat complicated if you have never done that. Automated supposes the use of anti-malware programs that can reset all browser settings at once.

Reset your browsers with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.

You can see the list of options for each browser. By default, they are set up in a manner that fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.

The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because the latter is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

Reset your browsers manually

Manual method of browser reset

To reset Edge, do the following steps:

1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:

2. After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original:

For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions:

1. Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:

2. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

If you use Google Chrome

1. Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:

2. In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:

3. Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default:

Opera can be reset in the next way

1. Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option:


2. After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown:

When the browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.

Scan your system for possible viruses

After removing the Searchokay push notifications, it’s time to see if these pop-ups brought any threat to your system. Launch GridinSoft Anti-Malware, and then click on Standard scan. It will be enough in most cases to find and remove malware. The scan will last 5-10 minutes; you are free to use your system during that process.

Once the scan is complete, you will see the detections or a notification about a clean system. Proceed with pressing the Clean Up button (or OK when nothing is detected).

How to Remove Searchokay Pop-ups?

Name: Searchokay

Description: Searchokay - a lot of users became a target for the pop-up advertisements. I have a lot of friends who literally bombed me with the questions like “how to remove Searchokay.com push notifications?” or “why do Searchokay.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Searchokay pop-ups, which may corrupt your browser’s correct performance, and create a lot of troubles while you are working.

Operating System: Windows

Application Category: Adware

Sending

User Review

3.75 (4 votes)

Comments Rating 0 (0 reviews)

1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.