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Craigslist is one of the best places to find used cars. Everyday thousands of private sales and dealer sales are posted online. I was looking for a used car so I streamlined my search so that I know right away when new cars are listed and I can keep track of the cars I've already seen and the ones that I am interested in.

I  was looking for a cheap used car that was reliable and fuel efficient. After doing some research using the Consumer Reports Used Car Buying Guide and Phil Edmonston's Lemon Aid Used Cars and Minivans I narrowed my search down to four models, the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Mazda Protege, and Nissan Sentra. Using Kelley Blue Book I found out that the 1998 - 2002 models would be in my price range.

So I did searches on Craigslist for each of the vehicles and limited the price to my range but a lot of stuff I didn't want got included such as older models. I didn't want to have to do a search for each year and model combination so I figured the smart folks at Craigslist must have a better way of searching and I read their search help document and found my solution. Pipes "|" are used to seperate lists of keywords and they act as a logical "Or" statement brackets "()" can be used around these lists and you can have multiple sets of bracketed keywords that act somewhat like a logical "And" statement. If I'm not explaining myself very well here is my search string:

"(1998|1999|2000|2001|2002)(corolla|civic|protege|sentra)"

This worked great for me and I only had to search once to find all the vehicles that matched my criteria.

I then  ran into a second problem I would be coming back to Craigslist a couple of times a day and I'd end up wading through ads I had already seen. I solved this by adding the convenient RSS feed for the search to Google Reader. Now as I scroll through the listings in Google Reader they are marked as read and I don't see them again, I can also star any vehicles that I am interested in to follow up on.

Now it only takes me a second or two to see all the freshest listings, a real advantage when a car with a great price gets listed and you see it right away. Here's how you can do it to:

First go to Craigslist and choose the "cars+trucks" category. 

Now enter in your search string utilizing the pipes and brackets as
detailed above. I like to limit the search to only the titles and I
also like to limit my price points (at least the max I'm willing to
spend).

Scroll down to the bottom of the search results page and you will see
an orange icon for the RSS feed link. Click on this link (Or copy the
link location if you do not use Google Reader).

Now click the "Add to Google Reader" button and your done (or paste the
RSS link into your RSS reader). That's all there is to it, you will now
be delivered targeted fresh used vehicle listings.