At RTR and during a brief interview with James, I mentioned plugging a search string nightly in order to eventually find my ideal van. He asked me to write up an explanation of that and send it his way. I did, and I figured I may as well post it here also. If you search Craigslist and you don't know this stuff, you should. Same goes for most search engines.
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If you watched the video and heard me say something about a search string and you just want to see an example of what I’m talking about, here it is:
"class b"|"camper van"|"conversion van"|roadtrek|"road trek"|"pleasure way"|"phoenix cruiser" -"grand caravan" -minivan -"mini van" -“class a”
Now some explanation.
The problem with performing a web search is that your efforts are limited by the person at the other end of the keyboard, and all the mistakes he made when listing his ad. Typos are often the best deals because not many people see them. Happily, most search engines like Google and Craigslist respect common modifiers, which make it much easier to perform a comprehensive search. The above example is something like what I used nightly to find the van I have now.
Basic search modifiers:
“ “ Quotes around a phrase will return the exact phrase.
+ Plus sign will ensure a term is included, but it could be separate from another term.
- Minus sign excludes a term. Combine with quotes to exclude a phrase.
| The pipe character indicates either/or, useful for searching more than one phrase.
Examples of how search results can be affected with modifiers:
It’s easy to see how quickly search results can be improved in this way.
For my second piece of advice, I suggest putting your new search string into searchtempest.com. I recommend this over autotempest because that site asks you to specify the model etc, and I’m assuming the guy at the other end of the keyboard didn’t enter the model name correctly. So, from searchtempest:
1. Enter your zip, the search terms you just learned, price, and a radius. I do not suggest specifying anything further because it’s too easy to exclude good results. If you enter a year range and the seller did not list a year, that ad won’t show up.
2. Click Search.
3. Click Direct Results.
4. Click Open Results Window.
5. Click “next” to see results from the next Craigslist area.
That latter part may seem kludgy to some, but without getting into anything more advanced like scripting this is a very fast way to search a wide area for a lot of terms. If you’ve been plugging one term at a time into your local Craigslist, you now have time to work on your golf swing instead. The example I put at the top of this page could be cut/pasted if you want to find a van similar to mine, or you might build a different term set to find a cargo van, or a class a, or what-have-you. Any time a particular thing is crowding your results, just tack it on the end of the string with a minus sign. e.g. –astro –freestar
Hopefully that helps someone.
------------------------------------------------
If you watched the video and heard me say something about a search string and you just want to see an example of what I’m talking about, here it is:
"class b"|"camper van"|"conversion van"|roadtrek|"road trek"|"pleasure way"|"phoenix cruiser" -"grand caravan" -minivan -"mini van" -“class a”
Now some explanation.
The problem with performing a web search is that your efforts are limited by the person at the other end of the keyboard, and all the mistakes he made when listing his ad. Typos are often the best deals because not many people see them. Happily, most search engines like Google and Craigslist respect common modifiers, which make it much easier to perform a comprehensive search. The above example is something like what I used nightly to find the van I have now.
Basic search modifiers:
“ “ Quotes around a phrase will return the exact phrase.
+ Plus sign will ensure a term is included, but it could be separate from another term.
- Minus sign excludes a term. Combine with quotes to exclude a phrase.
| The pipe character indicates either/or, useful for searching more than one phrase.
Examples of how search results can be affected with modifiers:
It’s easy to see how quickly search results can be improved in this way.
For my second piece of advice, I suggest putting your new search string into searchtempest.com. I recommend this over autotempest because that site asks you to specify the model etc, and I’m assuming the guy at the other end of the keyboard didn’t enter the model name correctly. So, from searchtempest:
1. Enter your zip, the search terms you just learned, price, and a radius. I do not suggest specifying anything further because it’s too easy to exclude good results. If you enter a year range and the seller did not list a year, that ad won’t show up.
2. Click Search.
3. Click Direct Results.
4. Click Open Results Window.
5. Click “next” to see results from the next Craigslist area.
That latter part may seem kludgy to some, but without getting into anything more advanced like scripting this is a very fast way to search a wide area for a lot of terms. If you’ve been plugging one term at a time into your local Craigslist, you now have time to work on your golf swing instead. The example I put at the top of this page could be cut/pasted if you want to find a van similar to mine, or you might build a different term set to find a cargo van, or a class a, or what-have-you. Any time a particular thing is crowding your results, just tack it on the end of the string with a minus sign. e.g. –astro –freestar
Hopefully that helps someone.
