Maybe I don't understand how to do this, but there seems to be no way to search for something in all of, for example, Massachusetts instead of its separate geographic regions.
If that's the way it is, it's ridiculous and if it's not obvious how to do a broader search, that's also ridiculous.
Craigslist deliberately forces you to interact within your local sphere. It may suck if you're on the border of two of their regions, but it helps them keep a local focus. They could easily implement nationwide search.
I don't see what goal of theirs is facilitated by having a crippled search function. Someone in a border is going to look in the neighboring regions anyway - it just makes it painful for them and leaves the door open for a more sensible competitor.
I'm surprised no one's built an app that just spiders the craigslist database and allows you to query it in more interesting ways than the craigslist developers could think of.
There have been NUMEROUS apps that provide beefed-up searching (multi-city,etc.) for CraigsList. Most get in trouble with CL because they're violating CL's TOS.
Craig and Company want you on their site, not on an aggregation site that sucks their listings...so they shut aggregators and scrapers down pretty quickly. OLX is, if I recall correctly, one of the many companies that has already gotten in trouble for doing this.
I hope they never give in to the temptation to redesign.
(And it doesn't hurt that it is blazing fast.)