There are lots of search techniques you can< NyanCat >
use to quiet effectively narrow down results to a management number to where you can then browse through to find the ones that best meet your needs.
You can read about them at the URL below.
"exclude" keywords can be quite powerful, since many spammers post the same boilerplate over and over in every one of their ads - use an exclusion for some identifiable term/phrase in there, all their ads "poof" from your results. And unlike them seeing their ads blocked and by craigslist's own servers, and then being able to change their ad to avoid the block, they have NO way to know what terms readers might be using to filter out their ads, or even that readers are doing so.