Betting and its paid search ads were indirectly banned in U.S. search engines as it is the whole Internet gambling and its paid search ads that were directly banned in U.S. search engines. But though this is the case, this still has significantly cost a lot to U.S. search engines, most especially to major ones.

Steve Baldwin, from WebProNews, wanted to know how much is the cost to U.S. search engines and so conducted an interesting financial exercise. He made a minimum benchmark with regards to what search engines left on the table for the month of April 2009. He used a list of 200 keywords from Google’s keyword suggestion tool. He made an assumption that paid clicks would have a 15 percent CTR rate for every gambling oriented SERP.

Based from Baldwin’s formulations, cost will be $9 632 382 and change a month, or around $115 million a year. Inferring this to Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing engines, figures can really be bigger using comScore’s search query rankings.

Baldwin even explained that, “according to comScore, Google’s share was 64.2 percent, Yahoo’s at 20.4, and Microsoft at 8.2, which would put Yahoo’s monthly loss at $3 060 756 and change, and Microsoft’s at $1 230 304”.

Additionally, “Ask, with a 3.8 share, is out $570 378 and AOL, with a 3.4 share, is out $510 378”. Also, “collectively, then, the money that all the search engines are leaving on the table each month is $15 004 198, or about $180 million a year”.

The cost mentioned is actually just based from Baldwin’s formulations and that all figures that come along with it are according to comScore. Everything can just be considered as assumptions. Nonetheless, the true cost can be considered still really unknown. Most likely, only U.S. search engines have idea about it.