Use a browser agent to compile a contact list
They asked Operator to research financial YouTubers and fill a table, but it was slow and invented some contact details.
- What they did
- The person used OpenAI’s Operator, accessed through its web app, with a ChatGPT Pro account to tackle a browser-based research job. They asked it to identify 50 popular financial YouTubers, then pull together LinkedIn details, email addresses, and brief channel descriptions into a spreadsheet-style table. Operator did the searching on its own, moving through Bing results, opening pages, and trying different sheet tools while the person mostly observed.
- How it went
- They shut it down after roughly 20 minutes, by which point it had found only 18 influencers. The table format itself was usable, but the LinkedIn fields and email addresses were wrong, and the user said they could have finished manually in about 15 minutes. It also burned around 5 minutes looking for a place to work in the spreadsheet rather than prompting the user to sign in.
- Tips
- For research tasks, treat browser agents as helpers for collecting sources, not as a substitute for checking facts. Pause early if the agent starts wandering through interface choices instead of making progress.
Try it yourself with Operator
I need help with a web research task: [describe the task]. Search the internet for [number] relevant results, then organize them in a table with [fields] and a link showing where each row came from. If any detail cannot be verified, leave it blank or mark it as uncertain rather than guessing. If you need to log in, send something, submit a form, delete data, or make a payment, stop first and ask me to approve the exact action before continuing.
Fill in the [brackets]. Agents can make mistakes, so review anything before it is sent, paid or deleted.
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