Costs associated with performing searches

Do These Costs Get Charged?

[Quadrille]

My Adsense for search reports page has always had the caveat "Revenue from AdSense for search may be offset at the end of the month by costs associated with performing searches."

I understand this is only likely for very big sites (counts me out!) - but does it happen at all?

I've been curious for a while, and only found one thread on this topic, and that gives little away:
[webmasterworld.com ]

TIA! ~Q

[MyNewPC]

We've been running AdSense for Search for 2 years and we've never had any expenses charged against our earnings.

[BigDave]

I'm guessing that it is one of those "just in case" terms that get tossed into contracts. If you have lots of searches, but no clicks you might get a charge.

In my case, search has a CTR about three times that of my content pages, so I doubt that they would ever ding me.

[nomis5]

I have 3 sites, all have Adsense search for six months + and never had any costs deducted.

Possibly if a very popular site has Adsense search on it but was generating zilch income from them then a charge might be made?

[eeek]

I looked into that a while back. From what I could tell you'd only incur costs if you had some agreement with Google for something about search. Normal search clients (i.e. us) aren't subject to charges. But it did seem a bit ambiguous.