Word order and proximity do matter in returning search results. Even if you use a "stop word" (a word that is not indexed) in your query, the search engine is aware that you had a word there.
advice and tips on
SEO
becomes something like
advice * tips on
SEO
If you write "advice and tips on
SEO" the search engine knows that there was another word between "advice" and "tips" because the position of each word in the document is stored in the index.
If everyone writes naturally, then we can all search naturally, and nobody has to think about stop words.
Google's warnings on the use of and/or are a bit annoying, and confusing for a lot of searchers who would never have thought to use boolean operators in their search.