Rivitid

One of the down-sides to craigslistCraigslist is its almost-stubborn insistence on being local. Location, location, location. Well – that makes it difficult. Because if I live in New Jersey, and I want to find a sofa for sale in New YorkNew York reviews, New Jersey, or Connecticut, I need to go to three different sites and punch in the same query, slide through three pages of confirmations and specifications, and then see results. Well not anymore.

Here’s an interesting trick I thought up that works flawlessly across all cities and countries on Craigslist.

Use Google, Not Craigslist

Don’t use Craigslist. You won’t beat them at their own game. They are simple, and damn it, they’ll stay simple. So don’t try to figure out any way to search on craigslist without defining the city or at least state. Instead, use GoogleGoogle search to find what you’re looking for. It eliminates the need to filter via location – so you can perform a broader search!

Filter your search to only Craigslist.org

The first thing you need to do is type a query that limits your search to only Craigslist.org. Here’s how you do that:

• Type Site:Craigslist.org
  • What this does is limits your search to only posts on Craigslist.org (no location specified)
• Next, add specific query. We’ll use Sofa for Sale as our query. So the query you need to type into Google is [Sofa For Sale Site:craigslist.org]
  • This will bring up all sofas for sale on Craigslist!

Here is a screenshot of the search results:

You can always play with the query to find different things, but I think this trick is well worth knowing next time you’re searching site after site in Craigslist for one item!

Let me know if this is helpful!

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