Sift’s distance filter: 25 km means 25 km

How Sift measures distance

Every listing card names a place: “Oshawa, ON” on Facebook Marketplace, “Oshawa / Durham Region” on Kijiji. Sift looks that place up in a list of 2,000+ cities and regions that ships inside the extension. It matches the town and its province or state first, then common local names such as “City of Toronto” or “Peel Region”, and where two towns share a name (there is a London in Ontario and one in England), it picks the one nearest your home.

Then it measures the straight line from your home to the centre of that town.

• Inside your distance: the listing stays, with a small badge in the corner of the photo showing how far it is (“12 km”, or “7 mi”).
• Past your distance: the listing leaves the page, and the grid closes up behind it. The reason, “32 km away”, is kept in the pill at the bottom of the page (“12 hidden”), so you can peek at what went and bring anything back.
• A place Sift doesn’t know: you choose whether those listings are shown, dimmed or hidden.

One honest limit: Sift knows the town, not the street. A listing in a big city is measured to that city’s centre, so the filter is as precise as the seller’s location line. In practice that is still far tighter than a radius that lets in other provinces.

Set your home

You do this once, on Sift’s welcome screen or later in its settings.

1. Type your town or neighbourhood and pick it from the list. Suburbs are there too: Scarborough, Etobicoke and Markham are separate from Toronto, Burnaby from Vancouver.
2. Or click Use my current location. Your browser asks permission once; Sift saves the spot as “Current location” and doesn’t track you after that.
3. Choose your distance and the unit, kilometres or miles.
4. Switch the distance limit on.

Change it whenever you like. Spending the summer at the cottage? Set home to Huntsville for a few weeks. Presets can carry their own distance, so “Bike hunt” can stay within 10 km while “Furniture under 200” goes out to 40.

If you’d rather use the radius you set on the site itself, one switch tells Sift to follow the site’s radius whenever the search carries one.

Places you block or allow

Distance isn’t the only way to draw the map. You can block towns by name, such as the ones across the bridge or the lake, and their listings leave the page with the reason “Blocked location”. Or turn it around and allow only a short list of towns, and everything outside them goes. Both work on Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji, with or without a distance limit.

Why not just use Facebook’s radius?

Because it was never meant to be a fence. Facebook draws its radius from a point it picks for your area, as a straight line, and shipped, sponsored and suggested listings can ignore it. Business Insider found a 4-mile search in Brooklyn returning listings in New Jersey. Our guide to why Marketplace shows listings outside your radius covers every leak, and the fixes that work without Sift.

If Marketplace has your location wrong altogether, see how to change your location on Facebook Marketplace. Sift’s limit holds either way, because it measures from your home and not from Facebook’s setting.

Works with the rest of Sift

The distance limit is one filter among several, and they work together. Hide “Ships to you” and partner listings so only local ones count. Combine it with blocked words, price limits and dealers. The same limit applies to search alerts: a new listing past your line never triggers a notification. See everything Sift can filter.

On Kijiji, the same home and the same distance apply, alongside hiding Top Ads. More in Sift for Kijiji.

Privacy

Your home is the most personal thing Sift knows, so it stays put.

• No geocoding service. The list of places is part of the extension. Sift doesn’t send town names, addresses or coordinates to anyone to look them up.
• No server, no account. Sift has no server of its own to send anything to, and no analytics.
• Stored in your browser. Your home (a label and coordinates) is saved with your other Sift settings. If you use Chrome sync, Chrome copies those settings between your own signed-in devices; if not, they stay on this one.

The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Where it works

Sift runs in Chrome, Edge and Brave on a computer, on Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji. It doesn’t run in the Facebook or Kijiji apps, or in a phone’s browser. Coming soon to the Chrome Web Store.