They're bangs — shortcuts to directly search on a particular website.

> For example, searching Kagi for !w Monty Python will search Wikipedia directly for "Monty Python" and take you to that Wikipedia search result. [1]

If you're on a plan with limited searches per month, it does not count against your quota.

DuckDuckGo has bangs as well.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

Looks like a shortcut (shebang) in the search text to send the search to Google Maps instead of Kagi Maps

I’d imagine it searches google maps.

You just append it to the end of a query and it reroutes it to google maps.