Craigslist Search

Posted on July 21, 2008

If you’re a Craigslist user, you know one of the most desired features would be a way to search the entire site at the same time.

For whatever reason, they don’t want you to do this. When the question of searching the whole site is posted to their discussion forums, the response is always basically the same –”you can’t”.

So if you want to find left-handed golf clubs, you would search the San Francisco Bay Area region landing page, then New York, Great Britain or any other city, state, or country.

It’s a tedious task.

But there is a little known process for doing the search through Google and getting the reults.

Google’s Advanced Search yields a way to limit results to domains, such as Craigslist.org. Advanced Search is the link located right next to the main search field on Google’s home page. Click on “Advanced Search” and follow these directions:

  1. Type in the item you’re looking for in the field that says, Find web pages that have… all of these words.
  2. In this field labeled But don’t show pages that have… any of these unwanted words, type in the word “directory” without quotation marks. This eliminates a lot of unwanted clutter. Directories usually contain names and telephone numbers. Without knowing the company, industry or people involved, they won’t do you much good.
  3. At the bottom of the Google Advanced Search page, in the final field labeled Search within a site or domain, type in “craigslist.org.” Leave out the www that is usually before craigslist.org.
  4. Click on the Advanced Search button.

You’ll get hundreds, if not thousands, of results from across the globe.

For example, a search for TiVo on the craigslist San Francisco Bay Area home page resulted in 128 listings. Using the Google Advanced Search returned 4,510 results.

You will definitely get some expired listings but Google crawls the craigslist site so frequently that you’ll get mostly the latest classifieds.

Add to any service

» Filed Under Craigslist, Google

Comments

2 Responses to “Craigslist Search”

  1. Paul South Florida on July 27th, 2008 11:26 am

    This is way easier than doing all that

    http://www.searchtheentirecraigslist.com

    dont forget to bookmark it

  2. admin on July 27th, 2008 1:59 pm

    Agreed, thanks.

Leave a Reply