I'm curious....am I in the minority of folks that use the "search" to look for something? I use it when I'm looking for a particular subject in the forum, AND it works in the classifieds too. Found a tripod that I wanted last week after doing a search. Saw only tripods, plus one pack that wanted to be traded for a tripod.
There is a firearms forum for those of us in the Northwest that has every classified section listed separately, and it seems to work that way also.
Yeah I just go to advanced search > search threads > select the Classifieds parent category > sort by date and search for a keyword. Sometimes use the prefix filter.