Back in 2007, I have posted about my interest in transliteration-aided search as you can see here: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-12-13-n23.html

After more than a year, Google released its own text transliteration tool: http://www.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.
http://imgur.com/9AWyl.png

How old is this?