ChatGPT with Web Search capabilities

This is just a fast and ugly way to implement search capabilities to ChatGPT that I did in an evening.

How does it work?

I've made a prompt that tells ChatGPT that it has access to search (see ./src/content-script/prompt.js for the prompt). This prompt makes it reply with {search} <query> when it wants to search for something. The extension then listens for this message and makes the search (makes a request to https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=<query>) in the background and sends the results back to ChatGPT as a message. ChatGPT then answers the original question with the additional information from the search results.

How well does it work?

It really depends. It kind of wants to search for everything and sometimes the search query it makes is not very good. This can degrade the answer a bit as it's really dependent on the search results. So if it tries to search for something but the answer is not in the search result then it will just make things up (hallucinating).

I've tested it with asking how many episodes of The Last of Us TV series have aired. But it then tries to search for the last of us tv series episodes. That can make it a bit harder to get the correct search results which in the end can cause it to answer incorrectly due to the poor quality of the search.

How do I use it?

You need to build the extension and then install it in your browser (or download from https://github.com/YePpHa/chatgpt-search-mode/releases/tag/v0.0.1). I've not published it as it's just a proof of concept. It should work in both Firefox and Chrome.

If you don't know how to build or install the extension then just ask ChatGPT to help you with it.

If you need to make a manifest v3 version just build like normal and then run

$ node bin/build-manifest.js --manifest 3 > dist/manifest.json

This will generate the manifest.json as a manifest v3 version.

After you've added it to your browser a new button will appear in the top left just under the New chat button. Clicking on it will create a new chat with the prompt pasted in.

Note: the extension actually looks for {search} <query> in all messages. So if you get ChatGPT to write that in a chat it will also initiate a search even if you haven't clicked on the New Search Chat button.

Note 2: the extension will hide the search results by default. If you click on it it will expand and show the search results. This was done to make it easier to navigate without getting distracted by the wall of search results.

What's the next step?

• It would probably be an idea to try to optimise the prompt. It could probably be able to make better search queries and figure out when it actually needs to search for something.
• The current method to start a new chat with search is a bit hacky. It currently dissapears sometimes. So making it more stable or figuring out a better way to do the function.