Craigslist Cease and Desist on Jaxed Mash Craiglook Claz
 

Searching craigslist nationwide or regionally has been a great tool for finding deals. I am afraid it may soon become a thing of the past. Online rumors blame eBay and say that eBay now owns a significant share of craigslist and some other classifieds. Maybe true, fits the fine american tradition of eliminating competition and centralizing ownership and control.

Is there any good reason why CL can't implement their own ZIP code/radius search?

Crazedlist still appears to work. Craiglook was C&D'd and switched to claz, but IIRC all it searches now is kijiji and a couple other non-CL sites. I always found the CL restriction rather annoying, especially since the Philly region is truly like 4 different CL regions.

I thought Craigslist was a non-profit. How can it be owned by Ebay?

Nope, they just don't charge for most of their classifieds. They make their money from (IIRC) real estate listings and job postings. You DO have to pay if you want to post those, which is how CL makes its money. Ebay bought 25% of them several years back and more recently had a bitter court battle which involved lawsuits on both sides.

what kind of real estate listings? Rental ads don't cost anything.

From Wikipedia:
Looks like its just for certain areas. Maybe that's why they like to keep all the areas separated, because they would have people going to the nearby listing areas instead of paying? Idk, just a thought.

how CL makes money
 

interesting fact page: http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet that indicates the real estate is only for NYC brokered apts.

the fact page also links to job posting info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/job_boards_compared

That's just grand. Well, backpage might be getting more popular then? Plus they still have escort listings! One stop shop.

All I can say is that I hope that 95% of the EBay top leadership develops a flesh-eating bug and dies screaming for morphine in the hospital. Not only for suing people who actually seek to improve CL out of existence, but for removing EBay's buyer feedback system so the place is now fraught with deadbeat buyers and scammers.

after fleabay made you have a paypal(which they own)account to buy and sell i no longer buy there.

I used to sell and buy a lot on Ebay. It was a great ride. I sold an old chair once for 5700 dollars and a saddle nobody'd dare put on a horse they cared about for 3K. They got rich, everybody made money, scammers got slammed, it was nearly the perfect giant swapmeet. Not anymore. The entire Ebay saga has been one that really makes me doubt mankind's "inherent goodness".

I'm still not sure what the advantage of being unable to leave bad feedback on unscrupulous buyers was.