Hunting around for stuff online can be pretty hard work, especially when you’re trying trawl through classified ads for jobs, tools or any other thing you need. The major sites like Craigslist offer comprehensive coverage, but the interface is not exactly great, while other services like eBay again make it tricky to browse through large numbers of ads in your area.

Which is where SearchTempest can help. This meta search engine brings together results from Craigslist, eBay and Amazon, and lets you search multiple cities at one time. The site rather cleverly uses Google for the results (so no problems with Craigslist getting annoyed) but that means that more obscure searches may not yield any results, even though they’re available on Craigslist. In which case it’s probably better to do a direct search on your site of choice.

One great thing you get is a list of RSS feeds for each of your searches, which you can import into your feed reader of choice to keep up with new ads as they appear. It’s very useful and can save a lot of time. To access a single file of your search for every city, just click on the Feeds For This Search link at the top right.

One other excellent feature is the ability to do a direct search on Craigslist for the terms you want. If you click on the Direct Results Mode link at the top center of the results page after you do a search, you will get two windows open, with a list of cities in the thin one, and a window onto the direct Craigslist page in the other. It’s a great way to cycle quickly through a heap of cities to find what you’re looking for quickly. Great touch!

All in all this is a top tool for anyone who uses Craigslist regularly to search for stuff, so bookmark it immediately.