Using The Advanced Keyword Interface to Search Craigslist

The proper use of keywords can positively retrieve the exact results you’re browsing for. The smart use of keywords will shorten search time, but more importantly, if your terminology is too broad or unspecific, you’ll be inundated with tons of unnecessary results, and most probably, after sifting through countless superfluous pages, your attention span will be lost. Furthermore, if you use notification features (email or SMS alerts), you’ll get “new results” notifications non-stop without actually getting the wanted information. This turns out to be incredibly laborious and annoying, and highly inefficient and unproductive... IF you're not getting results, chances are you're not using any character in keywords field, brings no results as there is nothing to search. Did you selected any keywords? if you do not select keyword, you're requesting nothing, if you use space bar in keywords, you will search for (one space bar)=all. If you search specific keyword you'll get results as requested.

Here is an example of how to use keywords properly, avoid headaches, and actually achieve direct results:

The Goal: Let’s say you’re a small shop that works on project cars and need cheap spare parts to fix and sell a car you’re working on at the moment. You want to find a vintage car made in the sixties for under 6500$ within the entire United States...

1st search

You’ll open up a new search folder in the portable screen (click the binoculars icon or Ctrl+t). In the Search Name field of the main menu window, you type in something which will make it easy for you to remember what the search is about. For this example, type “vintage car 1960 and older”

Press the Choose Search Location and check the box next to united states

Within the Search Criteria window, you’ll click the Advanced Search button, and get the corresponding pop-up window.

In the all these words: field, also known as the positive keywords field, you’ll write: “vintage car”. (If you use only “car” as the keyword, you’ll get millions of results, so in order to be more efficient, you start narrowing it down here by writing “vintage car”.)

In the any of these unwanted words: also known as the negative keywords field, you type in:

2007 2006 2005 (...) 1999 1998 1997 (...) 1989 1988 1987 (...) 1961 1960

Next, you press the Go! button and wait for all the search results to get loaded. Note also that you will see some “bad” hits (where the years you didn’t want show up), but keep in mind that even though the criteria limitations aren’t absolutely perfect (due to many reasons ), it’s still hundreds of times better than if you had just done a regular search – try for yourself and see! Note that the ( | ) symbols corresponds to the boolean “OR” command in Keywords text field.

Under Category, select “for sale”

Under Sub-category, select “auto parts”

Next, you check-mark the Only search titles box to search for titles only, and you do this because the potential posts you’re looking for might have some information that the negative keywords might knock out. For example, let’s say the post content has “clutch changed 1998”. If you don’t check the Only search titles box, the negative keywords parameters would automatically discard this post.

You set the price range from 1000- 6500 (If a post advertises for only $1, 99.9% of the time it’s a spammer, which is why you’re leaving the $100 minimum...), and hit the Start search button.

2nd Search

Once you get the first results, you’ll further pair them down using the Filter Settings command. In the keywords filed, you type in:

193 194 195

noting that each space corresponds to the Boolean “OR” command (make sure that the appropriate boolean is checked...), and press the Filter button. The filtered results screen will show an extremely concise and accurate set of posts which correspond to exactly what you’re looking for. Exiting the search will leave the filter screen active, and the next time you enter this saved search, it will automatically pull new results into this screen. If you pull up this search from the portable screen, all new results will automatically be collected and you only need to press the Filter button to apply your preferences.

It might appear as if all this typing is a waste of time, but actually, putting in the few extra moments to be precise at the onset pays huge dividends in the long run... The conjunction of these two searches (the positive/negative keywords plus the filter search) will display the most efficient results, and although it might be a little extra work, don’t forget that you only do this once and from now on, CraigsPal© is on auto-pilot. All the new results will be gathered for you using these exact and precise search criteria, and all you’re left with is a set of sleek, precise, and efficient results....

We do recommend dispersing searches up to 3-4 boolean keywords. Narrower searches perform faster.

Member EXAMPLE:

Below is the search I am currently using in CraigsPal. Notice there are no two word search terms. This screws the search string up even if you use quotes. Most of the time you don't need both words to find what you are looking for. As mentioned in previous posts it might be useful to include the words ride, cart (K version already included), fire in the search as well. The parenthesis with the pipe (|) symbol works for included words but you can't exclude words the same. You have to exclude each word with it's own negative symbol. The spacing of the words is important too.

(power | powerwheel | powerwheels | jeep | perego | gator | peg | polaris | mcqueen | safety | CAT | deere | gaucho | kart | loader) -ranger -rangers

Enjoy!