Linux search help... maybe?

Running Linux Elementary on an older Dell laptop for my kids school stuff. It's been weird lately, and honestly I don't know if it started weird a nd I never noticed.

I can't search. 

That sounds impossible, but I can't. I am using Chrome and also the Epiphany browsers, and I've tried changing settings and their  default search engines, but it never works. I can go to websites I know, other than Bing and Google, and I can click on the tabs on the home screen and navigate the web normally, but every time I try a search engine it goes:

This site can’t be reached

www.google.com’s server IP address could not be found.

Any ideas?

Sounds like those search sites may have been specifically blocked. Can you reach other less popular search engines like duckduckgo.com or ixquick.com?

Open a terminal and try "ping google.com", if that fails try "cat /etc/hosts" to see if it's blocked at the hosts file.

What do the DNS settings look like?  

https://antonyagnel.com/2017/03/13/switch-to-opendns-google-dns/

Pinging from the terminal seems to work.

I like those search engines better, so I just set them up instead for now, but it sure it strange.

I tried changing the DNS server to no avail.

Could it be a problem connecting to secure web sites? I know by default Google redirects you to a secure version of their page. (ie, https:// instead of just http:// )

What's in the Etc/hosts file?

dculberson said:

Could it be a problem connecting to secure web sites? I know by default Google redirects you to a secure version of their page. (ie, https:// instead of just http:// )

Could be a possibility but odds are he should've seen a problem with other websites since about half of them do that these days. Even your system time being set sufficiently wrong could prevent you from connecting to SSL-secured websites AND prevent the OS's automatic online time sync from working if it uses NTPsec or TLSdate.

Edit: I just checked and DuckDuckGo and ixquick/startpage both redirect to HTTPS, so that can't be the problem.

You might want to try disabling IPv6.  Sometimes routers, ISPs, etc. don't handle that well, and IPv6 connections bomb out horribly.