Forget Craigslist — I found an amazing apartment in San Francisco using Yelp

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Few web services will break you like Craigslist.

It's the go-to classified ads site for people looking to find an apartment, and yet, Craigslist's visual clutter and chaos leaves most users dazed. Day one of my apartment hunt in San Francisco, I wanted to cry looking at the purple-and-white mess of listings.

Then I tried searching Yelp on a whim. It's the most tried-and-true recommendation site on the web, though typically reserved for restaurants and other retail operations. 

But using Yelp, I found a new apartment in less than two weeks. Here's how I did it.

For the last year I've lived in Oakland, a 35-minute commute from Business Insider's office in San Francisco. It has a hopping downtown and quiet residential centers.

But my boyfriend's commute to Silicon Valley proper cost him three to four hours a day. We decided to move to San Francisco to make both our lives easier.

We didn't need a Victorian. We enjoy the amenities a new development brings, which, in San Francisco, usually means a fitness center, a mail room, and parking.