I love Craigs list, but wondered if there is software around that will search all sites for a particular item?

Try this.
http://www.crxsearch.com/forums/crxmain.php

6 times in a row... keep getting
"The confirmation code you entered was incorrect"

tried it with capslock, exct...

Never had problems with those anti spam codes before....

8 times is the charm I guess...

When I was looking for cars, I built a little application in .NET that would go get the RSS Feed search results for a bunch of the sites and return all the results and display them to page.

CL's RSS is a little wacky but it was pretty easy to do (if you are a programmer).

if you have gmail account your suppose to be able to get rss feeds, then you can
use google/gmail search function also.

At least that what I have read. I have not tried it yet.

QUOTE

but it was pretty easy to do (if you are a programmer).

I'm looking for the non-programmer type of application.

Check out bloglines.com. It's a nice online RSS feed organizer. You can add as many feeds as you want (such as all the Craigslist cities/searches you're interested in) and browse all the results from one interface. Once all your feeds are in and your page is bookmarked, it's super handy.