This page shows how to remove ads.yahoo.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Did you just see ads.yahoo.com in the status bar of your web browser and wonder where it came from? Did this also happen while searching at Google.com? Then read on…

Here’s a screenshot of ads.yahoo.com when it showed up on my computer:

ads.yahoo.com appeared in the log while I searched for something on Google’s search engine.

The following are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s statusbar:

• Waiting for ads.yahoo.com…
• Transferring data from ads.yahoo.com…
• Looking up ads.yahoo.com…
• Read ads.yahoo.com
• Connected to ads.yahoo.com…

Does this sound like your story, you most likely have some potentially unwanted program installed on your machine that makes the ads.yahoo.com domain appear in your web browser. Contacting the owner for the site you were at would be a waste of time. The ads.yahoo.com status bar messages are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the ads.yahoo.com removal in this blog post.

I found ads.yahoo.com on one of the lab computers where I have some potentially unwanted programs running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The potentially unwanted programs was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if something new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on web site that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

ads.yahoo.com resolves to the 98.138.49.43 IP address.

So, how do you remove ads.yahoo.com from your web browser? On the machine where ads.yahoo.com showed up in the status bar I had YouTubeAdBlocke, SalePlus and IStart 5.3.7 installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from ads.yahoo.com.

The problem with this type of status bar notification is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the ads.yahoo.com removal:

The first thing I would do to remove ads.yahoo.com is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something strange-looking listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started observing the ads.yahoo.com status bar messages.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Potentially unwanted programs often show up under the add-ons dialog in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to find and uninstall the potentially unwanted program with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop many years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually track down and remove unwanted software. When you’ve identified the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties deciding if a file is legit or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Did you find any potentially unwanted program on your machine? Did that stop ads.yahoo.com? Please post the name of the potentially unwanted program you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!