Fwiw, I do/did plain language searches for the last couple of years, following Google's lead - I think the more natural language searches have only really been in the last 5 years.

I often use terse searches too, mostly when I forget to write it out longhand to satisfy Google - but either way it's getting less wheat with my vat of chaff in the SERPs and several times recently I've had to re-phrase to get anything useful.