Hi, my name is Stew and I'm a Craigslist-oholic...

I love Craigslist and search for various things several times a week. I search for a variety of items and the list changes weekly. Even though the Bay Area is a huge marketplace, I still end up searching surrounding areas for specific items or for friends. (um, that sounds like I'm searching for friends... which I'm not doing, although I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I'm searching for items in far-flung-friend's areas.)


What I want is a way to search multiple geographic areas at once. I'd like to be able to tune the geographic area like any other search factor, without the hassle of jumping from one CL-area to another.
I've done a google search and scanned info for about a dozen different websites and software tools.
I'm more keen on the software angle than a website because I don't want to insert a middleman into the search realm. Not sure if that's really something that I should worry about, but I do.

At the moment (after only half-an-hour of research) I'm leaning toward trying out the freeware version of this:
http://www.motiont.com/craigslistreader.aspx

So-
For any other CL-philes out there in empeg-land, my question is-
How do you optimize your craigslist experience?

If you're having trouble finding services that will search multiple geographic locations, it's because Craigslist doesn't want you to do that. They want to keep it local. They've gone so far as to shut down services that offer multiple-area search, the latest being craigsfindr.com.

I think it's a little ridiculous myself. They now have so many cities on there that sometimes "local" might include three areas for you, and you don't want to go searching each one individually. On the other hand, I don't want Craigslist to get too national. I'm very happy that they do their best to squash cross-area listings, because most of the time it's spam or scammers.

Anyway, I think the founder of Craigsfindr is giving his code away out of spite, so you might have any number of tools pretty soon

I certainly appreciate the 'local' aspect of CL, no doubt. I could even understand a desire on their part to be 'pro-community', as opposed to 'pro-sales'.

Here's an example of a search that underscores my desires in this case.

My mom wanted a van.
A Ford van with a V10, late 90's or early 00's, low mileage, and a particular price range.

My (manual) CL search encompassed nearly all of California and eventually we found a van worth looking at near LAX, about 350 miles away.
That van should not have been so hard to find! Even with copy-paste, there was still a bunch of flipping between CL-sites and selecting various search terms.

*sigh*

http://www.craigshelper.com/

Squashing cross-area listings is one thing, but like Stew says, it'd be nice to be able to search cross-area, especially if I know I'll be traveling through the other areas I want to search in.

I don't see the attraction of craigslist. The site is so bare and fugly that it looks like one of those dodgy mirroring sites that are trying to bump up search engine ranks. Its also just full of spam and crap. I guess it might be different in the US where more people use it.

Yeah, it's pretty good in the US. It's destroyed the newspaper classified ad market to the point where newspapers are looking for new sources of revenue.

Yup, that's what I said...


The attraction is that, as Bitt said, it replaces the paper (which I don't get) and even eBay, which I think is horrible. I recently sold a calculator on eBay, it cost me $15 total, and the winning bidder even ended up being someone in my area, which I could have done for free without any of the hassles involved with ebay.

It really depends on the area. There are many CL cities even in the US that are full of spam and crap. Without the traffic of honest users to flag the crap it doesn't go away or get better.
All up and down California, though, it's a fantastic market. Like a searchable boot sale or auto jumble (to put it into UK vernacular).
It's a shame it hasn't caught on as well abroad, but it could be the large population of 'fluent' internet users over here that has driven it.

It might also be the earlier a city/area was added, the more time people got familiar with it before spammers came en masse. Raleigh, for example, was fairly early in the growth.

Edit: I actually got my current job off of Craigslist.

Yeah. I guess you do need a large enough population of actual users to use it.

I just looked through the London one and most things fit into one of several categories

1. Really overpriced
2. Junk that won't sell on eBay
3. Stuff that appears to be stolen. Laptops and consoles without anything else etc...
4. Scams
5. Spam
6. Work at home and earn £1000 a day!

I should say that another option I'd like to have for searches is the ability to include/exclude whatever subcategory I'd like, instead of only searching in the single categories provided.

For example, searching for solar power supplies, I'd like to include General, Household, Farm & Garden, electronics, etc, and exclude Cars & Trucks (which for some reason respond readily to the term 'solar').

In other words, cut out the category drop-down menu and replace it with an array of tick-boxes.
Such an array would be handy for location search management, as well.

I suspect trying to restrict cross area searches is a by-product of EBay buying a substantial stake in Craigslist. Pretty soon EBay will probably force Craigslist into doing something else that makes it more unusable. Just to squash it.

I've been using the RRS feeds from CL to monitor a few searches. I would use a site like craigshelper.com to do the initial search, then in each of the search results windows, grab the rss link for the search and put it in a news reader. I've been using NewsLife, which has some flaws, but seems to be working ok for this task. I have it set to update once an hour which keeps me right on top of tracking down some hard to find items. Once you have your initial feeds set up in your news reader, you can use your favorite text editor on the OPML file for a little find & replace to edit your search terms. Anyone else using a similar solution?

Hmm... so you did. I mis-parsed during first reading. :-p

This is looking pretty good! Thanks!
I notice that a lot of the webpages that search CL are being blocked by craigslist ( http://www.craigslittlebuddy.com/, http://www.crgslst.com/ to name two high-google-ranked ones). In some cases, the search engine page requests that you disable 'references' in the browser ( http://crazedlist.org/ ).
Craigshelper does not request this, though, and I wonder if they're on the list to get blocked soon.

As for disabling referrers, I've installed a FF extension called 'RefControl', which can configure the sent reference on a per-site basis.

Am I right in thinking that a software-based search solution (by this I mean it's on *my* machine, not the internet) would avoid referrer issues?

edit:
Ah! craigshelper will not be blocked because it isn't doing the search work! First FAQ: http://www.craigshelper.com/faq.php

An aside: I also just learned that to open a link in a new tab I can just click with the wheel button. All this time I've been right-clicking and selecting 'open in new tab' from the menu.

An application running on you computer would not have any referrer to send since you'd not be cross-linking from a different site as with the first scrapers you mentioned.

The best way for an application to go undetected would be for it to mimic a standard browser. In fact the application would be easily built using the web/browser frameworks in either Mac OS or Windows. It would forge its user agent to exactly match a common browser like Firefox or IE and perform the same type of normal unitary searches as CraigsHelper. The difference would be that instead of presenting you with a mess of paged results it can then locally massage the data, reformatting and presenting it to you in a completely custom fashion. Exactly what CraigsHelper claims it can't do.

You could always write a similar app in PHP and host it, but even though it would be using the cleaner searching, all the hits to craigslist would invariably come from one IP and would be extremely suspect. And blocked in short order if it became even relatively popular.

A custom application, or really custom browser UI is the way to go. Hasn't anyone done any greasemonkey or similar scripts for this kind of thing? I'd think that would be an even easier avenue and wouldn't require people to download a new app.

I don't use Craigslist primarily because you can only search a single very narrow locale at a time. Kind of pointless. That's even less useful than the old-school consulting of printed classifieds in the newspaper.