How in the Tech

Search Across All Craigslist Cities at Once

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 4, 2009 ⋅

I’m not a huge user of Craigslist but even I can become annoyed by a silly limitation of the service. The online classified site does not allow one to search across the entire site, instead you are constrained to your local locale. If I was looking for a great job opportunity I would have to visit, and subsequently search, every city available in Craigslist – as we are in a recession I would not want to limit my job search to just my current city of residence, beggars can’t be choosers after all. This is an extremely tedious process and for what reason? Well, supposedly a site-wide search is against Craigslist’s culture; they are trying to strengthen a close knit community. Furthermore, the service was never meant to be a replacement to Ebay – so these two reasonings go part and parcel. For me, this excuse is not valid and thankfully Google provides a mechanism around the limitations instilled by Craigslist.

1. Google’s Advanced Search provides a few metrics that helps one reign in their search net. From the Google homepage click Advanced Search.



2. Provide the item you are searching for under the section Find web pages that have … all these words.



3. Optionally, in the section titled But don’t show pages that have … any of these unwanted words type the word directory. This can help dial in your item search a bit further as directories typically contain just names and numbers that aren’t useful or even relevant to what you are looking for. Admittedly, I tend to skip this step, if only to save time in typing. Hey, that’s 3 seconds I can use elsewhere!



4. Lastly, at the bottom of the Advanced Search page you will want to provide the site you wish to constrain your search to. In the box labeled Search within a site or domain put craigslist.org.



5. You can see now your search string has been constructed from each step above in the Google Search box. Click Advanced Search to return the results.



6. Looks like there are tons of great jobs out there! What recession?