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.

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.

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?

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 manually

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

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).

1. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.