חטיפת חיפוש בדפדפן

Browser search hijacking is the replacement of the default search engine or home page in the user's browser by computer programming without the user's consent. The purpose of this study is to examine user perceptions towards the phenomenon of browser search hijacking. To this end, an experiment was conducted with 117 students from several academic institutions in Israel. The experiment contained three steps: completing a demographic questionnaire, performing a search results’ evaluation task, performing a search task to answer the preferences and attitudes questionnaire. The study found that users feel diverse feelings towards the search engines of browser hijackers and towards the hijacking experience, although the results indicate that there is no difference in satisfaction with the quality of results of the hijacking search engines compared to Google - the most popular and preferred engine by (almost) all study participants. Accordingly, the results of the study show that the most important reason for the participants to prefer a search engine in general, and to agree to use a search engine of browser hijackers, in particular, is not the quality of the results or user privacy protection, but the ease of use and user experience provided by the search engine. However, the effectiveness of the search engine and the relevance of the retrieved results is a more important factor for men compared to women. Women tend to agree to using the hijacker’s search engine more than men, and undergraduates more than graduate students. As expected, information security and user privacy protection were more important to participants with a strong technological background compared to the others. The conclusion of the study is that search engines of browser hijackers can be defined as "potentially unwanted software" (but not a definitely unwanted software). This is because under certain conditions users from some demographic groups may prefer to use these search engines. Nevertheless, all users dislike the very fact of replacing the search engine without their knowledge. Therefore, it is desirable that corporations that are interested in integrating a search engine into their business model will use other ways rather than hijacking (e.g., increasing information security and privacy protection) that match users' preferences, in order to promote their search engine