Searchmine

Sorry, there were a couple additional steps I took and am unsure whether they were part of the solution. I used the Finder/Applications to look for and delete apps that had been downloaded today. There was one related to Coupons that I had never heard of and certainly did not download, so I move that to the trash and emptied it. Also, I ran across something that suggested I go to Profiles under the Apple System Preferences and delete what was there. I did as there was a very weird jumble of something with the word Admin in it. You delete by selected the minus sign at the bottom of the window. Anyway, all of the above got me back to the normal Google search engine. Good Luck!

I have had this happen 3 times in the past few months. The first time it was my fault as I accepted the Flash download. But the 2nd two times, it kept asking for a password to download and install, then started to install on its own after I continued to hit cancel. If anyone has a suggestion for preventing this auto download I would appreciated it.

Meanwhile, this seemed to work for me today:

Click Safari menu and select “Preferences”. It will open the Safari Preferences window. Next, click the “Extensions” tab. Look for unknown and suspicious extensions on left panel, select it, then click the “Uninstall” button. Most important to remove all unknown add-ons from Safari. Once complete, click “General” tab. Change the “Default Search Engine” to Google.

Find the “Homepage” and type into textfield “https://www.google.com”.

You may  have adware/malware installed. Try downloading this program which was written by Thomas R, a long time poster. The program will search for malware/adware. The program will do the work for you which makes it easy. It may be necessary to run more than one scan. After running the scans, restart the computer.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for Mac      10.10 and later

Malwarebytes uninstall

Yes! the Profiles icon in System Preferences was the best solution. Thank you!