This post is on how to find what you are searching for more effectively on craigslist.org by using operators. For example, if you are looking to buy a garden tiller you could search for “tiller”. As the image above shows, you will get 135 hits. Unfortunately these hits will include those for boat motors as well (because on a boat motor the tiller is a horizontal bar fitted to the head of a boat’s rudder post and used as a lever for steering). To narrow down your search you could add the word “garden” to your search but some postings won’t use the word garden. A trick to narrowing your search involves removing the hits you don’t want by using the minus sign (-). Place a minus directly in front of terms you do not want in your postings, like boat. For example, search with the following terms:
tiller -boat
This search results in 108 hits, cutting out 27 listings that mentioned the word boat in them.
I noticed that boat motor listings were still making it into the listings and one common word was “outboard.” I modified my search to be the following:
tiller -boat -outboard
This cut another 10 bad hits from the results.
A trick I sometimes use when I think there may be multiple possible spellings for an item (or misspellings in this case) is to use the OR operator, in this case the | (pronounced “pipe”). It is located on the backslash key (shift-backslash). To see if someone is accidentally listing their tiller as tillor, enter the following search:
+(tiller | tillor) -boat -outboard
The plus sign says that the following term must be in the listing. The () brackets mean the plus sign applies to everything inside. In this case you are saying that tiller OR tillor must be present in the results. This is handy because you may find a misspelled listing that other people are not finding and score a great deal just because of a typo.
Those are some things you can try in various ways in order to more effectively search on craigslist.org.
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