Craigslist is an online classifieds service that serves almost all decent-sized cities in the United States and many big international cities as well. It gets more than 9 BILLION page views per month in 50 different countries and is used by more than 30 million people each month.

The website provides local classifieds and forums for jobs, housing, personals, services, local community, and events. The key word here is "local" because the problem is, it's divided into localities, and you can only search in a given location. If you want to find something in different cities, you need to do the same search over and over again, checking for the same thing, in multiple cities, which can become a pain in the neck pretty soon.

What to do?

Several options have shown up to alleviate this problem, allowing users to select several cities to explore at the same time, while searching by the same categories that Craigslist offers. These include CLSearch from Craigslist Companion, Craigslistwatch and Craig's Little Helper which lets you look up more than one list at a time. This last one allows expanded searches to multiple cities, states and even countries meaning that you can seek worldwide across all Craigslist sites.

Getting Started

We explain how to use Craig's Little Helper to illustrate our case:

1. First, enter some keywords in (A). This is what you're searching such as: "ford mustang", "desk" or "bush budget". You can leave it blank to browse an entire category (F).
2. The next step is to choose where to search. First pick a region (B). If you're in North America, choose N. America. Once you've got a region, you should see a list of States and/or Countries in (C). Choose the ones you're interested in, and click the add button (D) to queue them up for searching.
3. You should now have a list of cities ready to choose in (E). Just as you did with the first set of boxes, add all the cities you want to search here.
4. If you haven't already done so in step 1, select a category to search in (F). For example, if you're looking for something to buy, select sale/wanted. If you're searching careers, select jobs.
5. You'll notice when you choose a category that a matching sub-category box, and maybe some options (G) will appear. You can use these to narrow your search further.
6. Finally, click the "Search Craigslist" button (H) to run your search!
7. If at any point you want to start over, simply click the "Clear All" button (I) to clear all your entries and start fresh.

At the End

To say that Craigslist is simply a long inventory of blue links on a white background would be deceptive. This is because with local classifieds and forums for about 500 cities worldwide, adds stretch from collectibles right up to romance and from advice to jobs onwards to erotica and personals. Craigslist is hugely popular and these options are making it better by easing the overall search experience. Be sure to try them out. You won't be disappointed.