* and ? are significant but they're also standard well-defined wildcards which most users who wish to search using wildcarded text tend be well aware of. i've lost count of the number of times i've introduced someone to & who was already familiar with the usual * and ?. consider a simple example: searching for files using a trigger of sorts; filenames can't contain * or ?, but they certainly can contain &. surely if something were introduced to be used amongst other, well-defined pieces of syntax, it too ought to be well-defined?
and do you really think it is as sensible to interpret 'word' as being an English word (given hyphens, apostrophes and let's not even get started on dictionary lookups) as it is to understand that & should occur space delimited from that explanation and example?
