Crazed List T Shirt

10/13/2009    by John

Many users have a desire to search all of Craigslist at the push of a button. Craigslist does not support this feature for a couple of reasons (1) they believe your search should be local and (2) you can overload their servers. So if you use Craigslist you have to search one city at a time.

Many smart people have created tools that can search more that one city at a time and Craigslist is believed to have developed technology that ensures they do not work. Some believe that they have created tools that prevent muliply requests or referrals from one IP address.

One technologist has created www.crazedlist.org that seems to have found a way round the Craigslist blocking technology. It does require the user to modify the settings in Firefox and Firefox warns that this will void the warranty of their free browser:)

If you do not use Firefox here is what Droo (of Crazedlist.org) says about using IE to search all of Craigslist:

Q. Why can't you make this work for IE? Are you some kind of IE hater?

A: Why yes, I despise IE, it stinks more than my cat's ass. however hate is not my motivation, I simply cannot "make it work" for IE. Craigslist autoblocks referrals from my site, so unless you can stop IE from sending referral information, you'll get no results. That said there may be a way to block referrers in IE, but I haven't found it. Then again, I hate IE, and I hate windows, so I haven't really tried.

So we will continue to run our simple alert system in a way that helps people use Craigslist without slowing down Craigslist.

If you wish to use List-Alert.com to search more that one city then just set up more than one alert. Please remember that setting up hundreds of alerts is a waste of your energy and everyone's assets. We agree with CL's founder that Craigslist is really meant to be for local in-person exchanges, and that's what it's best for. If you don't want it local, try eBay.