Bringing Back Browsing with chatGPT

Hey y’all,

Recall the disabling of ChatGPT’s browsing feature on July 3, 2023 due to paywall and privacy concerns? Source

A quick search of this forum reveals that, I’m not the only one missing this feature.

other's looking for the browsing feature

Dont see the Web Browsing option - ChatGPT Plus

I still don’t have browsing capabilities in my ChatGPT Plus subscription

Access to Web Browsing plugin with ChatGPT Plus

I don’t know how far OpenAI has come in fixing these issues, but I’m hoping we can at least get some functionality, so:

Let’s get our web-reading feature back!

Here’s my proposed solution:

Part 1: remove it’s ability to click links and “browse the web”, just convert the browsing model into a basic “web-reader” It will only process specific links we provide, avoiding the previous issues with it circumventing pay walls.

Part 2: add a bit of text to the terms of use saying that you (the user) is responsible for the content in the links you provide.

I believe this could help solve the issue. What do you guys think?

For API users, this should be self-documenting.

functions=[
{
    "name": "bing_web_search",
    "description": "top results with url, description. Augments 2021 knowledge cutoff.",
    "parameters": {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
            "query": {
                "type": "string",
                "description": "keyword combos or phrases are best"
            }
        },
        "required": [
            "query"
        ]
    }
}
{
    "name": "go_wild_on_the_internet",
    "description": "Feel free to iterate and probe sites to get fulfilling data and execute actions via text browser",
    "parameters": {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
            "full_url": {
                "type": "string",
                "description": "any domain and path"
            },
            "summarize": {
                "type": "boolean",
                "description": "option: external AI will reduce content length"
            },
             "user_agent": {
                "type": "string",
                "description": "option: impersonate browsers or bots to get text"
            },
       },
        "required": [
            "full_url"
        ]
    }
}
]

It’s not OpenAI browsing the web then, it’s coming from you.

1 Like

Yeah there’s definitely the option of remaking the functionality yourself though the API or just using one of the many plugins people have made, I just don’t find them as good as the “original” :sweat_smile: