Speaking as someone who's also currently on a used car hunt, and have successfully bought one in the past (7 year old Honda Civic off of Craigslist, paid $6500 for it and have gotten 9 solid years out of it so far), these are my current car-hunting tactics, so maybe they'll help you:
Determine what I want/need (in my case, a compact car with decent trunk space that gets good gas mileage and won't kill me on maintenance costs as it gets elderly).
Go to Craigslist/Autotrader, set up a search for all cars between $1000 and (insert the top amount you're willing/able to spend here), and how far I'm willing to go to pick one up (25 miles from my address is my max usually, but that can vary if you're in a more rural area). Setting the bottom end at $1000 keeps the junkers and stupid dealer '$0 down!' ads off your results. Add any other criteria that are absolutely required (for instance, I only search for cars with clean/rebuilt titles under 115K miles, since I know from previous experience I can probably get a good ten+ years out of them. Your criteria will no doubt be different: if you don't know how to drive stick, you'll only want to search for automatics, etc.)
Take a look at what's on offer for my area.
Find the most promising listings (lowest price+lowest mileage+best condition), then do a Google search for that year/make/model and 'reliability' (example: 2015 Ford Escape reliability). This usually gets me to either Edmunds or cars.com review sites, where I sort reviews by newest first (since those folks have likely had their car the longest, and will talk about any problems they had, vs older reviews that will have more owners talking about their shiny new car fresh off the lot). This will take a bit of time, but will help you narrow down what year/makes/models are the best match to what you're looking for.
Once I know broadly what year/make/models of cars are the best fit, then I go back to Craigslist/Autotrader and start searching listings more specifically. Start picking out cars that meet my criteria (with bonus points if they have nice extras and are still within your budget), then I go out and start doing test drives. Oh, and I make sure to check the Kelly Blue Book prices on every car I end up going to see in person--when I find the 'one', I want to have as much information as possible, so that I can put myself in the best bargaining position. I've also started checking Yelp reviews on car dealers to see if I'm going have to fend off any hard sell tactics, or if they have a poor rep for trustworthiness.
Once I find the 'one', I arrange and pay for an inspection by a mechanic I trust. If the mechanic gives the car a clean bill of health, I'm good to go! If they don't, then I'll have to decide if I want to haggle the price down some more, or just move on.
I know this is possibly more info than you wanted--here's hoping it helps. And I'm definitely interested if anyone else has any tactics/tips that have worked for them.