Who Is Craig and Why Does He Have a List?

One of the better things to come out of the internet is the wealth of information one can find quickly and easily. A great example of this is classified listings. It used to be very costly for an individual to list their stuff (in technical internet speak) and difficult for individuals to find listings. Remember back when you were looking for houses to rent? You had to look in the newspaper or contact a property manager! How could you tell you were getting a good deal?


Enter Craig Newmark, an IT professional looking to start a list of things to do and see for his family and friends. Little did he know that his fun little project would almost undo an entire industry; newspaper classifieds have been made obsolete and, with more people getting their news online, so have newspapers. Nearly 15 years later, Craigslist.org has evolved into one of the most popular internet destinations. Let's take a look:

Step 1: Type "www.craigslist.org" into your address bar. Once the page loads, find your location. Perhaps this picture will help.

It will ask you to select your city next which is pretty self explanatory.




Step 2: Now you are in your local craigslist site. Take a look at the website address. See how it has distinguished itself from what you originally typed into the address bar?




Step 3: Browse the listings. The great thing about Craigslist is that it separates listings in a very logical, newspaperish way. So, you can look for housing or stuff that's for sale or jobs or services. By clicking on any of the categories, you can actually find the postings of people who are using craiglist to hock their wares!



Step 4: Find your listing. You can go about this in two ways, either browse or search. For instance, let's say you wanted to see how much people were asking for 6 bedroom houses in Boise, ID.


To Browse for Listings -- You would open your craigslist.org page and look for "real estate for sale", click that link:



On the next screen, you would refine your search (narrow the list of results) by selecting the number of bedrooms the houses have to have:

The resulting list is all houses in or near Boise that have 6 or more bedrooms.



To Search for Listings -- You would open your craigslist.org page, type a search into the search box and select "For Sale" from the type of search.


You will see that I obviously typed in the wrong thing:
*A good rule of thumb for internet searching is to type in keywords you might look for in a card catalogue if you were searching at a library.




Tip of the Day:
Craiglist is available in cities all over the world! That means that you can find classified listings for cities you've never even visited. Just for fun, why don't you try finding education jobs in the South San Francisco Bay Area! Hint: If you have browsed to education jobs, you can click on the "South Bay" tab at the top of the page to narrow your results. It will look like this: