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Side note: I was just wishing I could search across all of CL. (Looking for a particular car.)

However about half of the ads that were relevant had expired. Do you have a way of dealing with that?




We do. First off, the reason that's happening is that Bing (and Google before it) indexes craigslist pages, but has no way of knowing immediately when a previously-existing page disappears. They obviously can't be continually spidering every single page on the site to see if it's still there, and while craigslist could notify search engines of deleted posts, they have no incentive to do so.

Some searches tend to have more expired posts than others, but if you find they're a problem, we have a couple of alternatives. For searches across the whole country, the best option is RSS feeds. (Too bad 'RSS is dying' and all... ;) ) You can run any search on SearchTempest and click the 'Get Feeds for this search' link to grab an OPML file of all the craigslist results RSS feeds matching your search, within the search radius you specified. Import that file into a folder in your favorite RSS reader, and you've got a convenient, auto-updating feed of new results for your search, straight from craigslist.

The other alternative is our Direct Results mode. Basically that just opens up two windows: one for the results from craigslist, and one as an index to flip through cities. So you only see results for one city at a time, but can quickly flip through them with the 'Next' link. Obviously that can take a while for searches across the whole country though, so we recommend it more for smaller searches. Basically just a small optimization compared to manually opening up and pasting a search into a few separate CL cities directly.

More info here: http://www.searchtempest.com/faq.php#deleted


I guess you've gotta do the best you can with what you have to work with. ;)

Thanks for building this!


I almost think that should be the site's tagline.

And you're welcome. I actually built it back in 2006, but it's evolved a fair bit since then!




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