Advanced Searching on Craigslist

I use Craigslist every day to find great bargains, but I never read this helpful bit of advanced search training direct from their website. Helpful, helpful, helpful. Wish I had read it sooner. I pass this new-found knowledge on to you.

Advanced Searching

If simple keywords don't find what you are looking for, here are some advanced features to try.

Phrase Search

You can use quotation marks to search for a phrase:

"low miles"

That will find posts that contain the term 'low' followed by 'miles'.

Excluding Terms (filtering)

To specify one or more words you'd like to exclude, use a minus sign to negate them.

honda black -red

That will look for postings that contain 'honda' and 'black' but not 'red'. Note that a search must contain one non-excluded term.

"OR" Searches

By default, every term in your search must match unless it is excluded with the minus sign (see above). You can specify a list of terms that you want to find one or more of (instead of ALL of them) using a "pipe" character '|' like this:

honda | toyota

That query looks for postings that contain 'honda' or 'toyota' (or both).

Grouping

Finally, you can group terms together in parenthesis when queries are complicated:

red (toyota | honda) -2000 -2001

That query tries to find all listings that contain 'red' and either 'honda' or 'toyota' (or both) but do not contain 2000 or 2001.

Posting ID

If someone has given you the Posting ID (10 digit number), you can use that number in the search box to find the posting.