OpenAI’s new “ChatGPT search” Chrome extension looks like nothing more than a typical search hijacker, modifying Chrome settings so that your address bar searches go through ChatGPT Search instead.

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

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

“You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, for which you would previously have had to go to a search engine. This combines the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores , news, stock quotes and much 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 feature is first being tested with ChatGPT Plus and Team users, with plans to roll it out to everyone over the coming weeks.

As part of this release, OpenAI released a Chrome browser extension called “Search ChatGPT. “The Chrome Web Store page transparently states that the extension makes ChatGPT the default search engine when searching from Chrome’s address bar, pushing all searches through the “URL.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promoted the extension on X yesterday, saying everyone should get ChatGPT Plus and install the extension because it’s “really good.”

However, as underlines According to cybersecurity researcher Tal Be’ery, this extension does not have much to offer. All it does is change the search in Chrome’s address bar to use ChatGPT search, which makes it seem like any search hijacker of any kind that one commonly found on the Chrome Web Store.

Chrome extensions always carry a risk, and while it’s harmless, there’s nothing stopping developers from introducing new privacy-related features in the future.

However, if you want to use ChatGPT Search without installing the extension, you can create a new search engine in Chrome to send your searches to ChatGPT.

To do this, click Settings > Search engine > Manage search engines and on-site search. Then scroll down to “Site Search” and click the button Add button.

A dialog box will now appear asking you to fill in some information to create a search shortcut.

For our ChatGPT search shortcut, we used the following information:

Name: Search ChatGPT

Shortcut: @cgpt

URL:

Once you have saved the shortcut, click on the three vertical dots next to the newly created ChatGPT search and select By default. This will move the new search option to the top list of search engines.

Now, when you click on the address bar, type your search query and press Enter, the request will be sent to ChatGPT, which will respond to your query.

Overall, while there seems to be no risk to using the ChatGPT Search extension, it also has no real value when you can just create a shortcut.

Additionally, adding too many extensions to Chrome causes the browser to use more resources and potentially cause conflicts, making it best to keep them to a minimum.