Just finished swatting a digital fly that kept popping up on my Mac – a pop up warning me: Update Required. Your version of Yahoo provided search is out of date.

Not too concerned about updating anything Yahoo-related, I ignored the pop up for a few days. But when it wouldn’t go away, and had no cancel/close button I got irritated.

The only button immediately visible was a blue “OK” that committed me to the following:

By clicking “OK” you agree to install Chromium, set Yahoo provided search as your default search on all of your compatible browsers and accept the Yahoo Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and the Chromium Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

I read through the whole thing again and noticed the line I kept skipping: Click here to cancel the automatic update. The word “here” is linked but not underlined, so I’d skipped the sentence entirely a dozen times. I clicked to cancel, watched the little dumb fly disappear off my desktop and woke up the next morning to find the little bugger back for more, alive and kicking.

How do I remove this “Yahoo provided search is out of date” pop up?

Googling your version of yahoo provided search is out of date yielded malware-removal software ads and site after site threatening that the pop up “may reinstall itself multiple times if you don’t delete its core files” and promising to “save you hours” if you download more software to remove the horrid pop up.

But don’t.

You don’t need virus-killing, malware “destroying” software (programs that’ll actually just bloat up your machine and possibly infect it with worse adware).

To make the Yahoo provided search pop up go away, just remove the devious chrome extension responsible called, Search Manager.

That should do it. You can also report the extension for abuse if you’re feeling feisty.