> I still remember that people used to enter full questions in Google

I think that, in the early days of internet search, entering full questions actually produced worse results than just a bunch of keywords or short phrases.

So it was a sign of a "noob", rather than a mark of sophistication and literacy.

“Sophistication and literacy” are orthogonal to the peculiarities of a black box search engine.

Those literate sophisticates would still be noobs at getting something useful from Google.