Is Craigslist rotting on the vine?

It's remarkable what users will "put up with" when their core needs are being met. I don't like a lot of things about CL, but does it meet my core needs? Yes; I can reach an enormous number of people with a high rate of success.<p>It seems to me that CL is a great example of the 80/20 rule -- but unlike most other firms, they simply didn't bother to implement the other 80% of the features.

I know PG posted that YC would like to fund a Craigslist competitor. The issue is that it's hard to build the number of people needed to reach a critical mass. Likewise, it's not that eBay is so great, it's just the only place with that many people.<p>The CL search is really simple - really just whole word matches. That makes it hard to search for things that haven't been adopted by the CL community as keywords for items. I'm guessing this might be related to the amount of hardware they run. While search isn't that taxing a thing to do, it isn't necessarily easy (especially on CL's budget which doesn't rake in dough from VC or ads).<p>Think about comparing it to something like Digg. CL has more traffic (<a href="http://siteanalytics.compete.com/craigslist.org+digg.com/?metric=uv" rel="nofollow">http://siteanalytics.compete.com/craigslist.org+digg.com/?me...</a> - go to visitors-&#62;visits monthly and engagement-&#62;pages per visit). About 3.5 times the number of visits and about 10 times the number of pages per visit. So, CL is getting 35 times the amount of traffic of a major site like Digg. It's hard to scale up to 17.5 billion page views per month (24M per hour, 6,800 per second) - especially when you're not monetizing most of that. Comparatively, Digg is getting a mere 200 page views per second.<p>I'd love to see improvements to CL, but I feel like some of them would definitely require more hardware. CL wants to be independent with as little commercialness as possible. In the end, that leaves CL what it is - a bastion of whatever goes where it's also hard to find things.

Hopefully Jeremy Zawodny will drop in here and give an answer, since he left Yahoo and is working on mysql stuff for Craigslist now (including search, I believe).<p>See also: <a href="http://crazedlist.org/" rel="nofollow">http://crazedlist.org/</a>

The double edged sword of Craigslist is that they accept nearly everything. They're good enough for most people, which is why they'll continue to dominate.<p>However there are many vertical niches within classifieds that can still compete with Craigslist. Apartments, Houses, Cars, Crafts and Jobs have all split out into separate niches and seem to be doing well. There are still tons of smaller markets virtually untapped (Pets come to mind).

Here's my attempt: <a href="http://www.gigbayes.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.gigbayes.com</a> at a better Craigslist search FWIW.

Craigslist is like a social network site - its users and brand name are its sole asset. The actual design of the site isn't ideal, but it's enough to keep the masses happy, and that's what matters. A single competent competitor could take it down (like facebook did to myspace), but it would require a compelling reason to use it, not just better design.<p>My main complaint about CL is the lack of user profiles. On ebay, I can (sort of) use the user profile and ratings to gauge risk. This is especially important on something like CL, where you actually meet face-to-face with a person, not just get a product shipped to your address. I have had some sketchy experiences on CL...

The newspaper industry needs to stop complaining about Craigslist and realize that there's a market need for a better product. Craigslist is a good site, but it's full of scams + the search results are a mess + it's too anonymous.

What about just creating a "Search CL" type site with a killer search. Become the new way to get into it, rather than their own home page.

Personally, I've had to start searching Craigslist posts with Google in order to find listings I'd visited recently. They should just outsource their internal search to Google, and if they feel like making many millions of dollars, run Adwords ads along the search results.

Is it that Craigslist is rotting, or is it that people's expectations of search have moved forwards? How much would it cost to license search from Google? Would Google provide it for free? Are enough people scared of Google now that it would be a PR lose?

Here is my attempt to give Craigslist the features it badly needs (keeping track of which ads emails come from, keeping track of ads): <a href="http://listingninja.com" rel="nofollow">http://listingninja.com</a>

If Craigslist wants to do so much good for the world, why don't they monetize it more and donate the money to Kiva or their own foundation?

I just found my new job on CL.

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