I need a delay between opening a set amount of tabs from a Chrome Extension

I need to make 3 new tabs in my chrome extension with a delay of a couple seconds between each of the tabs creation, but when I use the chrome.tabs.create in a for loop for(i=0;i<3;i++) with the setTimeout(function() like so

    for(i=0;i<3;i++){

            setTimeout(function() {

                   search();

            }, 5000);

it just waits for the Timeout to finish and then opens all 3 tabs at once. I have looked at Chrome extension: open tabs with delay but it is a different situation.