Classic & Vintage - Searching Craigslist

Bikeforums.net is a forum about nothing but bikes. Our community can help you find information about hard-to-find and localized information like bicycle tours, specialties like where in your area to have your recumbent bike serviced, or what are the best bicycle tires and seats for the activities you use your bike for.



PDA

View Full Version : Searching Craigslist

kknh3
10-28-06, 12:24 PM
Does anyone know how to search craigslist as a whole rather than going to the individual city sites one at a time?

I've tried using Google by doing craigslist specific searches, but I'm not convinced that method finds all the items I'm searching for.

alk
10-28-06, 12:33 PM
i don't think this is possible. craigslist is supposed to be local. in fact, it's against the terms of use to try and implement such a search.
baxtefer
10-28-06, 12:53 PM
just use google

"colnago site:craigslist.org/bik" results in this......

http://www.google.com/search?hs=EcD&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=colnago+site%3Acraigslist.org%2Fbik&btnG=Search

kknh3
10-28-06, 01:11 PM
just use google

"colnago site:craigslist.org/bik" results in this......

http://www.google.com/search?hs=EcD&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=colnago+site%3Acraigslist.org%2Fbik&btnG=Search

I've tried this, but have observed it missing items that I find when using the city-by-city approach on craigslist

Any other ideas?
seaneee
10-28-06, 01:52 PM
crazedlist! (http://crazedlist.org/)
nlerner
10-28-06, 02:07 PM
crazedlist! (http://crazedlist.org/)

That's cool!

Neal
CV-6
10-28-06, 02:38 PM
crazedlist! (http://crazedlist.org/)

It is cool, but I think there needs to be some work done as to how results are returned. You have to sift through all of them. The google trick works better IMO.
kknh3
10-28-06, 05:23 PM
Is there any way in Google to save specific searches for later use?
CV-6
10-28-06, 06:04 PM
Is there any way in Google to save specific searches for later use?

Sure...bookmark the search page. I have done that with the Craigslist search. If you are not sure it is new, hit refresh
chnathan
11-14-06, 12:39 PM
If you like crazedlist, you might want to check out craigshelper.com as well. I've worked out a better way to lay out the results, IMO, allowing you to browse through them more easily. I've also included some craigslist options that (as of now) crazedlist doesn't have, such as searching only listings with pictures.

If you do check it out, let me know what you think!

-Nathan
http://www.craigshelper.com
chnathan
11-14-06, 12:46 PM
It is cool, but I think there needs to be some work done as to how results are returned. You have to sift through all of them. The google trick works better IMO.

The problem with this is that to determine whether results exist for a given city, you need to actually access craigslist's servers. This is against their terms of use, and has caused many search sites to get blocked. (Crazedlist actually used to check and format the results - they switched to the current format when craigslist started blocking their IP.)

CL is also starting to block google and other search engines from scraping their pages, so you will indeed miss results with that method as well.

Unfortunately my site (www.craigshelper.com) is under the same restrictions. I have tried to format the results page so that the cities with no results can be skipped past quite quickly. Any ideas on how to further improve it are very much welcome too.