I made a spreadsheet in google that will take a search term and search it in all the nearby cities on craigslist and dynamically output all the results in the spreadsheet using importXML queries. You have to specify which three-letter category you want to search for. Like furniture (fua), cars by owner (cto), musical instruments (msg), etc. I’ve only tested it in some of the for sale categories.
Here’s what you do:
- View the craigslist nearby cities search aggregator spreadsheet
- Make a copy of the spreadsheet (you have to be logged into your google account to do this (file > make a copy…))
- Open your spreadsheet copy in your google docs
- Edit the config options (the ones in light blue)
- View the listings on the “listings” sheet (results scroll horizontally)
Spread the word by linking back to this page. Enjoy!
Jerry Jones 
2 responses to “Craigslist Nearby Cities Search Aggregator – Google Spreadsheet”
Awesome, I like the concept..
But, I seem to be having issues for instance, I love cars from 1977 to 2003.
I have created about 20 different spreadsheets from your original, with all the different items I am searching for (that I normally do manually like):
Car Motor & type, then Car Type, then motor type, could there be an easier way to search multiple terms at the same time, possible even value amounts?
jn
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Glad it’s somewhat useful for you 🙂 I haven’t looked at this spreadsheet in a long time and it seems like it somewhat still works.
I don’t have time to improve that spreadsheet right now to fix any broken stuff or add any value segmenting, but I know you can search multiple terms using the | separator. You can look at Craigslist’s advanced search terms here: http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/search
For example, to search for a red honda or a red toyota on one search, you could enter this search term: red (toyota | honda)
Hopefully that helps!
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