Interesting. Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood wrote a pan-Craigslist search a few years ago and they asked him to disable it.

"Service disabled by request of craigslist.org staff

Jeff,

Your search tool just appeared on our radar and while we appreciate your desire to extend our search functionality it goes against the basic intent of Craigslist to be a local tool. Also it's in direct violation of our Terms of Use, section 5:

Additionally, you agree not to: use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - exception is made for internet search engines (e.g. Google) and non-commercial public archives (e.g. archive.org) that comply with our robots.txt file;

Please disable your tool for public use. If you refuse to do so we'll be forced to block all the proxy servers that you're using.

-Bill

http://www.codinghorror.com/craigslist/

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000252.html

Fair warning to Crazedlist.org (and everyone else):

Please do not ask me to switch browsers, change settings, or change my screen resolution. I have everything exactly the way I want them and will NEVER change any of them just to visit your site. I will click the back button never to return and continue the other million or so websites that respect my choices.

Thank you.

(This message is plain text and can be read by anyone anywhere using almost anything. What a concept.)

Yes, but that's a requirement to get around Craigslist's limitations (restrictions?). You're not doing it for Crazedlist's sake, you're doing it for Craigslist's sake.

Why won't Craigslist allow cross site search? Would it aid the scammers too much? Surely they could afford the server resources. There are many sellers willing to ship goods, but I would never know unless I used a service like this.

I think is a great idea.

To disable the refer header in the browser is a good idea anyway, i guess its bad for sites that need user analytics

Shady.