When you enter a search term in the Firefox location bar and press Enter, Firefox will per default do a "I'm feeling lucky" Google search and redirect you to the first result that matches your search term. This behaviour can be changed by a number of add-ons. If you'd like to restore the previous default behaviour, please follow these steps:

1. Enter about:config in the Firefox location bar and press Enter.
2. You should see a warning that making changes to the Firefox configuration can be potentially harmful to Firefox's integrity. Click the I'll be careful, I promise button to continue.
3. In the Search box at the top, enter keyword as the search term. You should see a few remaining items, one of these is keyword.URL. It should be bold.
4. Right-click on the keyword.URL setting and select Reset from the dropdown menu.

Now you're done. Please report back if this fixes your problem. Thanks in advance!

You can find more information about the Location bar search feature in the Location bar search article.

Thanks for the help, but that didn't work. "keyword.URL" was not bold and it wouldn't allow me to select reset. what next?

hello EZinTN, in your list of installed addons there's an entry called "General Crawler" which is considered malware and might be related to the issue you've described. please do a full scan of your system with the free version of malwarebytes which reportedly does pick-up and remove this sort of malware.

for more tips on how to deal with it please also refer to this support question: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/809712

M.bytes found that a couple of days ago and apparently it was only disabled, not removed. Can't seem to find a way to remove it...

ok, please do another full scan of your system or if this doesn't get rid of general crawler/media finder please follow the steps in the linked question that deal with the manual removal of the software.

if search isn't working afterwards either, you can try to reset firefox and/or reinstall firefox (which should reinstate the default google search engine in case it got tampered with).

Do a malware check with some malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.
You need to scan with all programs because each program detects different malware.
Make sure that you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.

• http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php - Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
• http://www.superantispyware.com/ - SuperAntispyware
• http://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx - Microsoft Safety Scanner
• http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/defender/default.mspx - Windows Defender: Home Page
• http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html - Spybot Search & Destroy

You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.

• http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/solutions?qid=208280684

See also:

• "Spyware on Windows": http://kb.mozillazine.org/Popups_not_blocked