I'd agree with you, if we were talking about something that is even slightly complicated. But it's not. Searching with the old-school Google syntax is asking the question "what documents contain these words X Y Z?".

It's not that hard, in fact very easy, to wrap your head around that. It's easier than looking up a phonenumber in the phonebook, or a business in the Yellow Pages. It's even easier than using the term index in the back of a book.

While asking a question might be easier than that still, it also has disadvantages. It's impossible to ask an exact question on a very specific subject. Try it in real life. You'll find you need context, or at least a series of back and forth questions to arrive at the answer you want to have.

If a search engine would implement the same method, any advantage from using questions over a conjunction of terms is negated. People would get tired of typing long question phrases, and unless the natural language processing of the search engine is absolutely perfect, they'd get pretty frustrated quickly because the search engine would interpret some of the questions wrongly.

For simple queries like "where can i find a recipe for blueberry pie?" or "what is the capital of Denmark?", we already have seen search engines can do this pretty well. For anything more complicated, they fail sometimes, if not most of the time.

It's not that hard for people to search "recipe blueberry pie" or "capital Denmark" as you think, either. People can get used to barking commands like this quite easily. Look at Star Trek ("earl grey, hot") or many other scifi series featuring a semi-intelligent computer. People almost expect it to communicate in terse phrases like that.

The big advantage, also for the layman, is that a conjunctive term query will nearly always yield the result they were expecting, because it doesn't leave much room for ambiguity. And if it does, it's when query terms hit a range of documents that weren't intended, but still match, again I refer to scifi, as well as fantasy, it may be frustrating, but it's also somewhat endearing (putting the user in a position of superiority) in the sense of an intelligent robot taking a request too literally. Or a genie in a bottle. Or an ET alien. Or commander Data. Or whatever.

On the other hand, if the computer interprets a full question in the wrong way, people get more annoyed, because the "too literal" explanation doesn't work here, after all, you typed a complete sentence, it should be obvious what you meant, right? So instead, people get the idea that the computer is simply not listening. And that makes it a lot harder to come up with a "better" question that would give them the answer they need.

Now, of course, as soon as search engines are able to do perfect language processing, as well as guessing a whole lot of additional clues from whatever bits of context they can get, typing questions into a search engine might be the better and easiest way. But natural language processing isn't really going there any time soon. Just look at the search engines that try this, how well they are doing now compared to how well they were doing 5 years ago, and there's not much progress made.

On the other hand, in the area of text-query processing, organising of data, cataloguing data, we have made tons and tons of progress. There's tagging, social network friends recommendation, and vastly superior methods of indexing large amounts of text documents for logical queries.