Craigslist is something of an enigma. It's an incredibly popular site for buying and selling items, finding jobs, and taking part in discussion forums — it regularly ranks in the top 20 visited sites on the internet, according to SimilarWeb. Nonetheless, its user interface has been relatively unchanged for decades. The simple text-based website has no modern features and lacks conveniences like the ability to search across multiple cities at once.
You don't need to wait for Craigslist to add that feature, however, because there are multiple sites and apps that give you this ability right now.
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How to search all of Craigslist using searchcraigslist.org
Search all of Craigslist is a website that's not affiliated with Craigslist, but uses freely available data to offer search results for every Craigslist post simultaneously. It's a good resource if you want a fast and easy complete search of Craigslist in a browser, but be aware that the results can be overwhelming — they include entries from every Craigslist city, across every category and section of the website.
To use the website, open www.searchcraigslist.org in a browser and enter your search term. For most searches, you'll get probably many pages of results. Note that the top results will probably be ads.
You can sort your results by relevance or date, but otherwise you have no way to sort, filter, or manage the search results.
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How to search all of Craigslist using CPlus for Craigslist
For more control over your searches, try CPlus for Craigslist, a free app you can download for your iPhone or Android device.
1. Start by installing the app by downloading CPlus for iPhone or CPlus for Android.
2. Tap the location listed at the top of the screen, above the search box.
3. On the locations page, tap the symbol in the top right and then browse the complete list of Craigslist sites, tapping any cities you want to add to your search. When you're done adding cities, tap the back button at the top left, and tap "Done" on the next page.
4. Tap a category you want to search.
5. Depending on the category, you may need to choose a subcategory to search. For example, within Housing, there are more than a dozen subcategories, or you can simply choose "all housing."
6. Tap the search box at the top of the screen and enter your search term.
Your search results should include all the items in the selected category for all the Craigslist cities you selected. There are a lot of options for sorting and filtering your results, and you can change the category to see results for this search from other parts of Craigslist.
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Dave Johnson
Freelance Writer
Dave Johnson is a technology journalist who writes about consumer tech and how the industry is transforming the speculative world of science fiction into modern-day real life. Dave grew up in New Jersey before entering the Air Force to operate satellites, teach space operations, and do space launch planning. He then spent eight years as a content lead on the Windows team at Microsoft. As a photographer, Dave has photographed wolves in their natural environment; he's also a scuba instructor and co-host of several podcasts. Dave is the author of more than two dozen books and has contributed to many sites and publications including CNET, Forbes, PC World, How To Geek, and Insider.
