Short Term Apartment Hunting in NY

I recently found myself searching for short term apartments in New York City. This was surprisingly difficult so I thought I would list some of the resources I found that met my constraints.

I wanted a furnished place for a maximum six months. I have no credit history (my first time here), no guarantor (I have no family here and wanted to avoid relying on friends). Finally, I wanted to be somewhere between the East Village and 60th Street in Manhattan or Williamsburg.

Without further ado, here are the websites that showed most promise:

• https://www.homeaway.com/ - like Airbnb but longer term and thus slightly cheaper.
• https://www.roomorama.com/ - same as above.
• http://streeteasy.com/ - dedicated to NYC but very hit and miss. Involves contacting realtors through the 'Contact' button which invariably leads to tedious email chains trying to arrange viewings etc. There are some 'No Fee' listings that are from directly from building management companies but these are few and far between.  

If you are really scraping the barrel, there is zillow and airbnb but both of these seemed either to have poor filtering (couldn't find furnished stuff on zillow) or expensive.
None of the usual longer term websites like zillow and streeteasy allow you to filter down to short term listings only with much reliability which makes life hard. Most email exchanges were 'Is this available for a six month lease?' to which you get 'No' or 'Yes, starting 2 months from now'. I needed to move in within a month.

Finally there is also http://www.nycityapartment.com/ which seemed to have promising stuff and specialised on short term leases. Good if you are really at your last tether. The prices were good and the realtor was nice but the places I looked at weren't particularly appealing - perhaps you could make them your home with a little TLC.