A friend of mine used my computer to search Craigslist. I’ve never gotten round to using the site, but I thought I’d check it out today. It came up in the San Francisco region. I can choose individual cities, but is it possible to search Craigslist for the entire U.S.?
On the right side there is a list of all the cities with individual Craigslist sites. The nearest to you is Seattle. Vancouver has a site too. I scan the Seattle Craigslist site daily, I have found a couple of goodies in the free section. I have also sold some stuff too.
Craigslist isn’t designed to be used nationally. The whole point is that you deal face to face after initial contact is made.
Yeah, I’ve never found a way to use the search engine nationally. But I only use it when I DON’T want to deal without face-to-face agreement and the ability to check the item out. If someone tries to make a deal with you without this on Craigslist, be careful it’s not a scam. Someone just tried to pull that on me yesterday through Craiglist by saying he was going to send me a postal money order and all that. His spelling and grammar was really bad and the “money order confirmation” email was just hilarious, so it made me wonder if there’re international scammers making a living by cruising through Craigslist to pull this stuff. Be wary.
I’ve noticed a fair number of people trying to sell things on the local (Minneapolis) Craigslist site, but who are obviously not in the area.
Clues are when they don’t have a real neighborhood or suburb name in the “this is in and around …”, they just say “Minneapolis” or “Direct ship to Minneapolis”.
Or they give a phone number that is obviously not from around the area, or even a 1-800 number.
And they often seem to have many of the same item to sell, and re-post the item about once a week or so.
I’ve always thought that pretending like this was a hint that these sellers weren’t the most honest, and enough reason for me to avoid dealing with them.
Yeah, Craigslist wasn’t made for non-local transactions. Unlike eBay, it doesn’t have any way of keeping track of user reputations and hence no way of telling whether somebody’s going to rip you off if you can’t see the item in person.
There is also a “Spam” button on the top right you can use to report posts that link to outside websites or have been posted repeatedly. Once enough users flag a post as spam, it is removed automatically.
Sold a 'cycle on craigslist. Got nowhere near the asking price. Agreed on a lower price, and then when the guy came to see it he talked it down another hundred AND got all the gear thrown in free. That was my husband’s fault. AND the guy insisted that we note the price on the pink way low so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes. I didn’t want to do that after he just jacked us (bastard shoulda paid the tax) but hub was just desperate to sell the bike. He shoulda waited for more offers.
Said hub just bought a car thru craigslist. HE in turn talked guy down $500 but guy wouldn’t budge on the tax thing.
This is just two of several transactions conducted through craigslist. We’ve had pretty good experiences but with the bike sale I had a guy emailing from England with the old cashier check/return me some money scam. Even after I had sent an email to all interested stating clearly the terms of payment. Idiot. What do those fools think they’re dealing with here? Don’t they also see the huge fraud warning on the site? Meh, we Uhmareuhcuns are pretty sharp.
What everybody else said. Can’t lay my hands on a link off-the-cuff, but CL has had inquiries about how to post items for sale to multiple cities. The official response was that it can’t be done, precisely because they want it to be a local thing.
Industry news is that Craiglist is planning to add a regional search tool, but has no plans for a national one.
I think it has wonderful aspects. We posted a giveaway of some old wine that we weren’t going to drink. Of course it brought a lot of responses instantly, but I was able to sort out the answers in no time and had a lovely young woman who worked nearby come pick it up. It is becoming notorious for certain abuses. But so is fire. Depends on how it’s used.
Just a heads up, Craigslist has added a Bellingham page for those up north.
You *could * insert “site:craigslist.org” to the end of your google search. I just tried it and pulled up results from many cities.
For instance, I ran this search “armchair site:craigslist.org” and limited it to the past three months.
It’s not perfect, but it’ll pull up a bunch of listings.
Yep, and you can actually do a little better. Say, a free microwave, nationally?
site:*.craigslist.org/zip microwave
Looking for a Ducati, nationally? Search just motorcycles:
Very nice.
zip? mcy? 
The names of the subdirectories that contain that kind of listing. One of the results of the search:
http://vancouver.craigslist.org/zip/138236105.html
zip is the subdirectory for free stuff.