Anyone else notice they sent cease and desist letters to a bunch of craigslist search tools across the web? Quite a handful had to change their coding to again do something craigslist should do itself - give the option to search nationally and sort by any number of factors.

They make money from human trafficking but that is ok.

BalugaJoe: They make made money from human trafficking but that is ok.

Fixt for the under-rock-dweller crowd.

Keep in mind, food companies, airlines, landlords, electricity companies, etc. all technically profit from human trafficking as well. That doesn't mean they endorse it.

They are dicks.

5 roses for 1 month.

Somaticasual: Anyone else notice they sent cease and desist letters to a bunch of craigslist search tools across the web? Quite a handful had to change their coding to again do something craigslist should do itself - give the option to search nationally and sort by any number of factors.

That would be sellin' out, man.

Somaticasual: Anyone else notice they sent cease and desist letters to a bunch of craigslist search tools across the web? Quite a handful had to change their coding to again do something craigslist should do itself - give the option to search nationally and sort by any number of factors.

Craigslist reminds me of one of those weekend coding projects, where you write it in a few days, throw it out there and you're done with it. You don't want to ever mess with the code again because you know you took a lot of shady shortcuts and if you try to mess with them you're probably better off writing it from scratch the right way, but you never have the time needed to do that, so just leave the damn thing alone and let it run.

How it became so damn popular, that's a whole other story.

// was writing web based ticketing tools (with searches) for engineers back in 97, craigslist started around 95 and never changed much.

one of my old weekend projects from 2003 ... No, I never have time to go back and update it either, but at least I wrote it properly (I used it as example code for some folks I was training).

CL sucks hard. I don't know what the hell is with them. I mostly use kijiji (Canadian version of Yahoo classifieds) now since it just has so many better features. I can search for something within X distance of my postal code. When I upload, it uses a flash based uploader to encode the photos to the smaller size used by the site before uploading, rather then the multi-megabyte size that digital cameras tend to take. This makes uploading much faster. As a user, you can see much bigger photos of item's too.

Something they both seem to miss is Boolean searches, I don't know what is with that. That shiat is necessary.

Lars The Canadian Viking: Something they both seem to miss is Boolean searches, I don't know what is with that. That shiat is necessary.

It's even dumber when you realize that searching of that nature is built into SQL. I mean, not to oversimplify or anything, but it boils down to this.

select * from listings where zip code in ('92102','92121') and complex 'some crappy hellhole';

(the difficulty comes from security and scaling, IE, you can't have tons of users running CPU/Memory intensive queries, you have to be able to scale those up a lot ... but only if your site becomes popular).

// sanitize your queries
// parsing some tokens
// index index index
// cache rules everything I see

HTML OTOH, is a PITA on fark (ate my damn less than symbol, I should know better by now.)

select * from listings where zip code in ('92102','92121') and complex 'some crappy hellhole';

Ok, it did it again, and I'm sure I typed the code right that time, go figure.

// can't keep up with these filter changes

Since moving to the UK, I found a website over here called Gumtree. It's the well lit street on a Saturday night to Craigslist's dark wet alley. I don't think it's in the US yet sadly. But it's just laid out way better, the search options are more intuitive, and it's just seems nicer.

And there's no rape-y, slave-y sex personals either. So that's a plus.

TexanBoy:

And there's no rape-y, slave-y sex personals either. So that's a plus.

Look harder

Link

Touché, the add saying i will sleep with you for money is nice