OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Search Chrome extension looks like a search hijacker

OpenAI’s new “ChatGPT search” Chrome extension looks like nothing greater than a typical search hijacker, altering Chrome’s settings so your handle bar searches undergo ChatGPT Search as a substitute.

Yesterday, OpenAI launched its new AI search product “ChatGPT Search,” which gives real-time solutions to conversational searches on the platform. 

“ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before,” mentioned an OpenAI announcement.

“You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for. This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more.”

“ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask, or you can manually choose to search by clicking the web search icon.”

The function is being examined first with ChatGPT Plus and Staff customers, with plans to roll it out to everybody over the approaching weeks.

As a part of the discharge, OpenAI launched a Chrome browser extension referred to as “ChatGPT search.” The Chrome Internet Retailer web page transparently says the extension makes ChatGPT the default search engine when looking from the Chrome handle bar, pushing all searches by the “https://chatgpt.com/?q=” URL.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman overvalued the extension on X yesterday, stating that everybody ought to get ChatGPT Plus and set up the extension as it’s “really good.”

Nonetheless, as identified by cybersecurity researcher Tal Be’ery, there’s not a lot to this extension. All it does is modify the Chrome handle bar search to make use of ChatGPT Search, making it really feel like every garden-variety search hijacker generally discovered on the Chrome Internet Retailer.

Chrome extensions all the time include a threat, and whereas this one is innocent, there’s nothing to cease the builders from introducing new privacy-concerning options sooner or later.

Nonetheless, in the event you want to use ChatGPT Search with out putting in the extension, you possibly can create a brand new search engine in Chrome to ship your searches to ChatGPT.

To do that, click on  Settings > Search engine > Handle search engines like google and web site search. Then scroll right down to “Site Search” and click on the Add button.

You’ll now be proven a dialog asking to fill in some info to create a search shortcut.

For our ChatGPT search shortcut, we used the next info:

Title: ChatGPT Search

Shortcut: @cgpt

URL: https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s

After getting saved the shortcut, click on the three vertical dots subsequent to the newly created ChatGPT Search and choose Make default.  It will transfer the brand new search choice to the highest listing of search engines like google.

Now, if you click on on the handle bar, kind your search question, and press enter, it is going to ship the request to ChatGPT, which is able to reply your question.

General, whereas there doesn’t appear to be any threat to utilizing the ChatGPT Search extension, there’s additionally no actual worth to it when you possibly can simply create a shortcut.

Moreover, including too many extensions to Chrome solely causes the browser to make the most of extra sources and probably trigger conflicts, making it higher to maintain them at a minimal.