ChatSearch
ChatSearch is a free Chrome extension that makes every word of every Claude and ChatGPT conversation searchable as you type, with typo tolerance and search by meaning. Your chats are indexed inside your own browser.
Free and open source (MIT). Chrome 120+, and other Chromium browsers. Not affiliated with Anthropic or OpenAI.
The built-in search on both sites only looks at titles, or gives up after a handful of results. ChatSearch reads everything.
Titles, your messages, replies, artifacts, canvas documents and pasted files. Results appear on every keystroke, with the matching passage highlighted.
Matches inside words (plane finds airplanes), fuzzy titles (flt wk finds Fleet Week), and "did you mean" for typos.
Don't remember the words? Press Shift Enter to find chats about the idea, using a small model that runs on your own computer.
Opening a result scrolls the chat to the passage you were looking for and highlights every match, with a tiny navigator to step through them.
Uses your existing login. Chats you open or reply to are indexed instantly from the page itself, and the rest stays in sync quietly in the background.
The index lives in your browser. No accounts, no analytics, no server that sees your chats (unless you opt into cloud embeddings).
When an exact search finds nothing, or when you ask for it, ChatSearch compares the meaning of your query with every passage of every chat.
The model (MongoDB's leaf-ir) is downloaded once and runs on your GPU. Each passage is embedded exactly once, in the background, at a gentle pace that slows further on battery.
Press Enter and the chat opens scrolled to the passage you searched for, with every occurrence highlighted. Enter and Shift Enter step through them on the page.
The toolbar popup remembers your last search, so you can click away and come back. Dock it in Chrome's side panel to keep it open while you read, or type cs and a space in the address bar to search from anywhere.
Filter by source, by what you wrote, or by date, and use operators like "exact phrase", -exclude, from:me, in:title and after:2026-01.
ChatSearch isn't on the Chrome Web Store yet, so it installs as an unpacked extension.
chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode (top right).chatsearch folder.Nowhere. ChatSearch downloads your history with your existing login, the same way the sites do, and stores it with the search index in your browser's own storage. The only other connection is a one-time download of the embedding model from Hugging Face. If you switch on cloud embeddings, passages of your chats are sent through a small relay to an embedding service; that is off unless you choose it.
No. The index lives in a background document that unloads itself after a few idle minutes, searches take milliseconds even across ten thousand chats, and background work runs at a reduced pace (lower still on battery).
ChatGPT only allows a slow pace of full-conversation downloads, and that allowance is shared with your own use of the site. ChatSearch lists all your chats immediately, then fills in the text gently in the background and whenever you open a chat. For an instant full index, request your data export in ChatGPT's settings and import the zip in ChatSearch's settings.
It should: they run Chrome extensions the same way. Load it unpacked from each browser's extensions page.
To update, replace the folder's contents with the new release and click reload on the extension's card. Removing the extension deletes everything it stored.