Why are there sites in my history I've never been to?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com, giving you a little bit of confidence
and hopefully a lot less fear as you use your technology.
This is one of those things that comes to me periodically, and here's an example
question I periodically clean my browser history, but after a while website entries
begin to appear in that that I've never actually been to.
Some of these sites look quite disturbing and are not sites that I would ever go to.
Why would these entries appear?
Do I have spyware or a virus?
It's usually nothing to worry about.
It happens, and I'll explain some of the scenarios how in a moment.
But the bottom line is, yeah, sure, malware is certainly a possibility.
I'll also call out what's called Foistware
pups or those kinds of things that get installed when you install something else.
There's something that kind of tag along during the installation process,
but ultimately most of the scenarios are significantly more benign.
Let's start with the scariest - malware.
Yeah, it can happen.
It's not as common as it used to be, but malware can sometimes force your
browser to go to places that you never intended for it to go to.
Same thing with pups, potentially unwanted programs.
Often they will install things like toolbars or redirect your home page or
search page or any of those kinds of things to basically promote whatever it
is they're promoting over what it is you actually want.
The solution here is simple actually make sure you don't have malware.
Scan for malware with an up to date antimalware tool.
Visit the article.
How do I remove pups?
Voiceware drive bys toolbars and other annoying things I never wanted.
That will include some information about how to take some extra steps beyond just
truly malware and actually deleting some of these other things.
But by and large, I really generally don't think that's the problem most people face
when they find things in their browser history that they never went to.
The number one thing I think, are pop ups and pop unders.
Now, chances are you're not seeing very many pop ups or pop unders these days
because browsers are doing a really good job of blocking them.
They prevent things from popping up and showing up in your face.
That was one of the ways that advertisers and other places basically tried to get
you to see things that you weren't really interested in seeing,
that you didn't want that ad, you didn't want that site, whatever.
The process of blocking a pop up is an interesting one.
It's technically complex.
I believe that it is possible for this to be the scenario.
You visit a web page.
That web page then tries to pop up another window.
The browser starts to process that request.
The way that it does that is,
it starts by getting the page that is supposed to fill in that pop up.
That act of fetching the page is what puts the page in your history.
But then the browser realizes, oh, wait, this is a pop up.
We'll get rid of it.
We will not show it.
We will make it go away.
So the bottom line is that, yes,
something showed up in your history, but it was blocked before you ever saw it.
So it's as if you never actually went
to that page because, like I said, you never really did.
Another scenario is the way that web pages are constructed.
Pages can be constructed to get their
information from multiple different sources.
The canonical example, for example,
is when I'm looking at an Ask Leo page, the images are actually coming
from a different website than the text on the page.
Now, images are a special case.
They typically don't cause additional entries in your history.
However, there are other techniques
that can actually cause pages to be displayed within pages.
Those, then, can in fact, result in entries in your history.
You wouldn't realize it because all you're seeing is the page you went to.
The fact that it was constructed from other pages isn't necessarily
obvious, but it still could end up making entries in your search history.
Now, the final one is something relatively
new, and that's a feature called Browser Prefetch.
The idea is that while you're looking
at a web page, that page, if it has links on it,
the browser will take a look at those links and maybe start to fetch them
already in anticipation of your clicking on those links.
You haven't clicked on them yet,
you haven't gone to those pages yet, but the browser starts to fetch
the information on those pages before you need it so that when you click,
if you click, the result will be that much faster.
You can, of course, turn this off in various settings,
but the bottom line is that if it's on, it is theoretically possible that this
could cause entries in your history for pages you actually didn't go visit.
It shouldn't. Browsers probably shouldn't be putting
history unless you've actually clicked on the page.
But I have to throw out this as an example
because it's possible and the behavior would depend on the browser.
The bottom line here is, honestly,
I really don't think this is anything to be terribly concerned about.
Obviously, scan your machine for malware periodically.
You should be doing this anyway.
It should catch the most egregious problems.
The rest of it, yeah,
it's just kind of sort of how browsers and the Internet work.
For comments, for updates,
for links related to this topic and more, visit AskLeo.com/2624.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.