Back in 2007, I have posted about my interest in transliteration-aided search as you can see here: blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-1 ...

After more than a year, Google released its own text transliteration tool: google.com/transliterate/

But today I finally noticed its implementation in web search. If you check the following screenshot, you'll see that it extended my Arabic search into finding transliterated matches.

imgur.com/9AWyl.png