Lube The Mind

For whatever reason, Craigslist does not want/allow you to be able to search the entire Craigslist network (every city) at once. When the question of searching the whole site at once is posed to Craigslist discussion forums, the response is always “you can’t,” and the civility of responses goes downhill from there. It should be noted that searching the entire site goes against the culture that Craigslist attempts to engender. It was never meant to be an alternative to Ebay, a global online forum for trade, but rather a community-based forum for trade. Do not be surprised if your communications with people outside your area are ignored or you are treated as a scam artist.

So if you want to buy/trade tickets to a show, buy a car, or maybe trade your entire collection of Saved by the Bell tapes on VHS, and you’re not having luck in your specific locale, you would search the San Francisco Bay Area region landing page, then New York, Great Britain or any other city, state, or country where tickets, cars, and SBTB are found.

It’s a tedious and, now, unnecessary task. There’s a workaround to searching Craigslist’s entire world-wide offerings at one time.

How It’s Done

Google’s Advanced Search yields a way to limit results to domains, such as Craigslist.org. Advanced Search is the link located right next to the main search field on Google’s home page. Click on “Advanced Search” and follow these directions:

1. Type in the item you’re looking for in the field that says, Find web pages that have… all of these words.
   
2. In this field labeled But don’t show pages that have… any of these unwanted words, type in the word “directory” without quotation marks. This eliminates a lot of unwanted clutter. Directories usually contain names and telephone numbers. Without knowing the company, industry or people involved, they won’t do you much good.
3. At the bottom of the Google Advanced Search page, in the final field labeled Search within a site or domain, type in “craigslist.org.” Leave out the www that is usually before craigslist.org.
4. Click on the Advanced Search button.

You’ll get hundreds, if not thousands, of results from across the globe.

For example, a search for “Saved by the Bell” brought 231 results in the Google Advanced Search. In the Craigslist Cleveland Area home page, there were 0 results (Losers).

Granted, you’ll get some expired posts, but you’ll also get a plethora of active, relevant results.

This should/could be a good tool for finding people trading/selling/buying tickets for shows across the map, and you can be almost postive it’s wookie-free (since wookies are dumb).

UPDATE: You can now use the site www.searchallcraigs.com.  This site simplifies these steps into one convenient search bar.