Great point! This makes sense for techies - I tried hard to give Bing a good run, but found myself hitting google.com too often (after looking at the results). " !g" would have definitely made Bing sticky for me!

I used to work on a search product. Interestingly, a lot of layman users don't even realize which search they use. So this would not help for any real gain in numbers for the search engines adopting it (other than in the tech community).

There was a time when mywebsearch (or some such search engine) had its stats very close to the numbers of a very popular torrent client. Needless to say, a mini-survey revealed the users did not even realize their browser's home page had been hijacked (when they installed the torrent client)! They thought they were "googling" (results might have been powered by Google, but thats not the point.)