Did anyone invest the effort and time to figure out how secure and practical this is?
In terms of security, things are a bit more complicated. The last ~year has seen a couple papers (https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/718 and https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/172) that demonstrate damaging and practical attacks against most SSE constructions. It's really not clear how secure any SSE scheme is in practice, or whether there is a sensible model in which SSE can be both secure and efficient enough for practical use.