That sucks, searching is how I double-checked dubious craigslist posts. Select a couple phrases and search google. If identical posts pop up under various other cities on craigslist, then I knew for sure it was spam/fraud.

Just one of the many ways third parties fix broken things on Craigslist. Things Craigslist refuses to recognize.

I think this is correct, though the EFF post is too vague, and doesn't quote the passage in its current state.

Also, CL has not removed itself from search engines. They're using NOARCHIVE.

Last I checked, robots.txt excludes all crawlers from at least several major classifications, including housing listings (/hhh):

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /cgi-bin
    Disallow: /cgi-secure
    Disallow: /forums
    Disallow: /search
    Disallow: /res/
    Disallow: /post
    Disallow: /email.friend
    Disallow: /eaf
    Disallow: /reply
    Disallow: /?flagCode
    Disallow: /ccc
    Disallow: /hhh
    Disallow: /sss
    Disallow: /bbb
    Disallow: /ggg
    Disallow: /jjj
    Disallow: /*rss$

http://www.craigslist.org/robots.txt

'jjj' is jobs, 'ggg' is gigs, 'bbb' is services, 'sss' is for sale, 'ccc' is community, 'res' is resumes.

Right...but not apartment listings (aap)

http://newyork.craigslist.org/aap/ http://newyork.craigslist.org/roo/ http://newyork.craigslist.org/sub/

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

Point. I mistakenly assumed /aaa covered all of housing.

Looks like the same principle applies to a number of other subcategories. So while overview indices aren't spiderable, subindices are.

Google still provides a screenshot of CL pages - I doubt it would take much work for an enterprising hacker or 3taps to hook an OCR library up to that.

But wouldn't that be insane on bandwidth?

Inbound bandwidth is free.

I'm talking about for downloading all those pictures.

That's the point he was making - inbound traffic to AWS is $0/GB.