Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google, Search
How to do a global search in Craigslist
Many people may not have noticed this, but it's impossible to do a global search at Craigslist.org. It sort of makes sense, doesn't it? For most of the public, we'd imagine a global search would turn up useless results, but that only makes Craigslist useful for most of us. What about thoe crazy-curious folks that just need to know all about what's being offered, asked for, etc. around the world?
Marty Orgel submitted to Wired a short-tutorial on how-to do a global search of Craigslist through Google, and it's pretty easy. Just do an advanced search, and in the "Find web pages that have... all of these words" box, type in your search terms. Make sure "directory" is entered into the "But don't show pages that have... any of these unwanted words" box, and type "craigslist.org" into the domain box at the bottom.
The method worked for our global search of "time machine", which turned up 12,700 results from several regions including: New York, Austin, Northern Virginia, and San Diego. Most of them really had to do with a time traveling machine, so, yes, there are several crazy people in the world. Don't worry, though, we're pretty sure many of the listings originated from well-humored teenagers... well, we hope that's the case.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
edward said 10:14AM on 7-22-2008
I say fail (with no caps mind you). First the accuracy of the search is dependent on how recently google crawled those servers, and for foreign country's who's craigslist servers google crawls less often (say every 30 days (yes that used to be the search standard, I don't know what it is today)).
Also many international craigslist sites are in different languages, this method does not take that into account.
Finally the tutorial does not include instructions on how to search for something like computers, just try the following search "computer -directory site:craigslist.org"
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solidus636 said 12:18AM on 7-23-2008
Well, you could also put in the url from your location and it would give you results based on your location.
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hnkelley said 8:10PM on 7-26-2008
I love Google and how powerful it can be, but sometimes there is a better way. I use Craig's Helper (http://www.craigshelper.com/). You can search just like you're used to in Craig's List, but with the added bonus of searching various regions/countries. More powerful search tools are also used such as include or not include certain words or phrases. The resulting list is organized by city (or country in some cases). I found this a long time ago and it was great, then the owner made some changes that gave me ideas, so i offered up my suggestions. I'm proud to say that I ended up helping a little bit in making those additions. Now, he's added even more power to it. Just a great, useful, site and much easier than this Google method.
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skeany said 8:21PM on 7-29-2008
I suggest http://localadwatcher.com for craigslist global search and email alerts.
You can't use google search since 99% of the time it links to expired postings, and yes - as somebody else has pointed out - it searches all over the world, not just the U.S.
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Paul said 4:11PM on 9-20-2008
You might want to take a look at http://www.searchtheentirecraigslist.com to get real time results from every citiy and category on the whole craigslist site.
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