Update 5/29/3017 – This article breaks down how to use Google to search across Craigslist for remote/telecommuting jobs, however, this tactic can be used to find ANYTHING you’re searching for on craigslist.

In addition to finding great telecommuting jobs on SkipTheDrive, CraigsList can also be a powerful tool. The problem, however, is that when searching telecommuting jobs within CraigsList, you’re only able to search within one city at a time. This might make sense if searching for a job within a certain geographical region, but if searching for jobs that allow you to work remotely, you shouldn’t be confined to a certain area.

Using Google, you can circumvent the constraint of only searching one city at a time within CraigsList!

Simple Google queries

We’ll start with some simple examples, and build our way up to more advanced searches.

Suppose you’re looking for a sales job that allows for telecommuting. Go to Google, and type:

site:craigslist.org AND “telecommuting okay” AND sales

The site: operator tells Google to only search the specified domain.

The reason for the keywords “telecommuting okay” up above is because when people post jobs on CraigsList, one of the options they can choose is for the job to allow for telecommuting. If so, there’s a tag associated with it that states “telecommuting okay.”

The phrase “AND Sales” states that the page within CraigsList must contain the word sales. Note that the word sales can appear anywhere within the page based on this simple query. It’s possible to search by title only, as you’ll see below. Feel free to replace “sales” with whatever job type you’re interested in.

Filtering by date posted

To filter by date, do the following:

Perform your search Select the Search tools link underneath the search results Select the Any time drop down menu and select the appropriate range.

It’s important to note that this time range is when the page was indexed within Google, not necessarily when the job was posted on CraigsList. It seems, however, that Google quickly indexes CraigsList pages, so the time difference should be negligible. I’ve seen Google index CraigsList postings within an hour.

Advanced Google search operators

The example above is a simple example of how to use Google to search CraigsList for telecommuting jobs. It’s possible to perform an even more granular search by using Google’s advanced search operators.

Searching by title only

The example above returns results for CraigsList postings containing the word “sales” anywhere within the job posting. If you’d like to refine the search so that the word(s) appears in the title, use the intitle: syntax within your query, such as:

site:craigslist.org AND “telecommuting okay” AND intitle:sales

Logical OR

Logical OR can be applied if searching for different jobs, such as sales OR marketing. An example of a query using this would be:

site:craigslist.org AND “telecommuting okay” AND (sales OR marketing)

This will pull up CraigsList postings that contain either of those keywords.

Logical AND

Logical AND can be applied when multiple conditions must be met in order to satisfy the query. For example, if you are looking for a job posting containing multiple keywords (such as sales and marketing), the example query below would be used:

site:craigslist.org AND “telecommuting okay” AND (sales AND marketing)

This will pull up CraigsList postings that contain both of those keywords.

Exclusion

Often times job listings from other countries will show up in the search results, such as manila.craigslist.org. For anything you’d like to exclude in the query, add a hyphen before it. An example of this would be:

site:craigslist.org -manila.craigslist.org AND “telecommuting okay” AND (sales AND marketing)

In this example, you’re stating that you want to search the entire domain of craigslist.org, except for manila.craigslist.org.

Exact phrase match

For an exact phrase match, such as sales manger, use double quotes as shown below:

site:craigslist.org AND “telecommuting okay” AND “sales manager”

Additional tips

Use parentheses for relevant groupings as needed

It’s possible to use the julian date format in Google queries as well, however, using the date filter up above is much easier. To use the julian date format, you would append daterange:<start>-<end> to the query. A julian date convertor can be found here.

Bookmark this page for future reference

Feel free to add some example queries below in the comments section to help us all out.