Millennials I assumed would be more tech-savvy than a Gen Xer, now the wrong side of 40 (me). So when I suggested they use the from: operator to search in Twitter I expected they would know what I meant but I was wrong. A discussion ensued and I learnt they hadn't heard of the search operators I use daily across all sorts of platforms. 

For the uninitiated, a search operator is something that can be used in search boxes to refine the results returned. So why should you bother using these when you've been happily searching all these years without them? They give you more of the results you want, speeding up your work, making your life easier. 

A brief bit of background: these operators are often referred to as Boolean operators. The British mathematician George Boole devised the core operators AND, OR & NOT in the mid 19th Century as a new algebraic logic. Subsequently, they have been used extensively across most computer programming languages.

My colleague, Jenna asked me to share some of these operators that could help her and you use Passle, Twitter, any search engine, your emails and any application with a search function. 

Here goes: 

There are more operators than I've listed above but these are the ones I use most frequently. Just remember to capitalise AND, OR & NOT

 You won't break any platform you try using these on. So give them a go and make your life a little bit easier.