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Search All Craigslist Sites at Once with Google
Posted by Adam Pash at 8:00 AM on July 23, 2008
Wired's How-To Wiki details how to flex your Google-fu to get Craigslist results from every Craigslist domain. In essence, the author does a Google site search of Craigslist.org and excludes pages with the word 'directory' to eliminate directory listings of names and phone numbers. The resulting query looks like:
site:craigslist.org "search terms"
...where "search terms" is replaced by whatever you're looking for. Granted, Craigslist is designed primarily for local buying and selling of items, but if you don't have a Craigslist city near you or you don't mind trying to do some long-distance Craigslisting, this method can help you find good deals across the globe. You can limit your results to newer listings by using this method for filtering Google results by date.Tags: craigslist | google | organise | search
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
gumnaam
Posted 10:08 AM 23/7/08
Isn't crazedlist.org a better solution?
gumnaam
Samuel Wat
Posted 10:08 AM 23/7/08
Kewl! Thks Lifehacker!
Samuel Wat
thinkalive
Posted 9:36 AM 23/7/08
Not reliable....this method doesn't consider the fact that Google's results are not real-time and are often delayed enought to miss listings altogether, even when using the "site:" command
thinkalive
berribrand
Posted 8:42 AM 23/7/08
Whoa... the possibilities are endless.
berribrand
dnthomps
Posted 8:39 AM 23/7/08
Adding to this tip, using a query like
site:[craigslist.org]
searches all of the 'for sale' sections of every city.
dnthomps
se7a7n7
Posted 8:10 AM 23/7/08
Pretty cool. For instant comedy, use this to search for "dildo". There's 1,070 results and so far, the first 2 pages are hilarious!!!
se7a7n7
amber9904
Posted 12:02 PM 23/7/08
Oooooor, you could search
"site:[yourcity].craigslist.org [search terms]"
and get only your city's worth of stuff.
amber9904
reubencox
Posted 12:27 PM 23/7/08
@amber9904: Perhaps you hadn't noticed the search box on your city's craigslist page which does that already?
reubencox
dj_skilz
Posted 1:06 PM 23/7/08
@gumnaam:
Thats pretty decent, but I have come to love Craigs Helper more.
htp://www.craigshelper.com
Google gives alot of cached results, which hurts many CL ads. They are often removed, or result in 404 by the time I click thru on Google.
dj_skilz
garbanzo-bean
Posted 5:16 PM 23/7/08
hmm, pretty basic google stuff here.
this is my favorite search:
"keywords" intext:rapidshare.com/files/ OR intext:megaupload.com/?d= OR intext:sendspace.com/file/
you can find just about anything with that :)
garbanzo-bean
mskadu
Posted 8:23 PM 23/7/08
Yeah, have tried that in the past. For us in the UK, it is Ebay's gumtree.com. But as people above have pointed out, the search results contain item pages that have been removed. I wish there was some way to filter that out.
mskadu
zealousagenda
Posted 1:16 PM 23/7/08
I find the Yahoo Pipes method presented by Witigonen site:[www.witigonen.com] to be far more effective for multisearching craigslist postings. It provides results with little delay from the time of their posting. I was surprised that Yahoo Pipes is easy to use, and produces powerful results.
zealousagenda
DominiqueMarigny
Posted 1:09 PM 23/7/08
I find the Yahoo Pipes method presented by Witigonen to be far more effective for multisearching craigslist postings. It
provides results with little delay from the time of their posting. I
was surprised that Yahoo Pipes is easy to use, and produces powerful
results.
DominiqueMarigny
jrinco11
Posted 12:20 AM 24/7/08
yah, [crazedlist.org] ftw
jrinco11
Kilim
Posted 2:28 AM 24/7/08
Hmm, I think what you want to do is site:city.craigslist.org/ AND "item" so you don't get results all over the country. For example site:boston.craigslist.org AND "winky" would get you every winky for sale in Boston on Craigs List.
In fact, if you did this in feedmysearch.com you'd get a daily update for winky's that go on sale as a feed on your homepage.
Kilim
resonanteye
Posted 2:25 AM 24/7/08
add -search term you want to exclude
such as site:craigslist.org "search terms" -"has been flagged"
this filters out pages that have been flagged. etc, etc.
resonanteye
edmicman
Posted 4:44 AM 24/7/08
I already use an alternative of this:
I live reasonably close to three cities that all have CL sites (mid-Michigan). Either area is an hour or less to drive, and for some items I'd be willing to go to any of those. To save on searching, I created a Yahoo Pipes app that merges RSS feeds for each CL city I'm interested in. CL searches can be saved as RSS; I just parsed that out, changed it for each city, and on Pipes created a text input.
So ultimately I have a single RSS feed that takes an input, and returns an RSS feed that searches all of the local Craigslist cities. Plus, it's RSS so it pushes updates to *me*. Here's the link:
[pipes.yahoo.com]
edmicman
D Wiz
Posted 6:59 AM 24/7/08
This is not just for craigslist. You can use site:www.companyhere.com on any site. I often find it provides more valuable results than the in-site search that the company provides.
D Wiz
AnotherTechie
Posted 2:27 AM 24/7/08
@dj_skilz:
I've used Craigshelper.com many times before and I agree that it's one of the better methods of searching all of CL. I've run into issues with it occasionally locking up Firefox and I'm not sure why, but overall, it rocks.
AnotherTechie
jonbongard
Posted 8:52 AM 23/7/08
What would be really awesome is if there was something that would actively monitor craigslist (locally or otherwise) and notify if you someone posted a listing matching your criteria. You know, if you wanted to make sure you got first dibbs on those ABBA LP's.
jonbongard