> It's actually insane the levels of understanding the algorithms that are responsible for serving us information have and how little we, the creators of said algorithms, understand what's going on in said algorithms.
Keyboard layout mismatches are common enough that I assume Google has a layout detection stage hardcoded just like they have typo correction hardcoded. And the creators of said algorithms probably understand very well how they work. (The naïve way would be to convert from every possible layout to every other layout, but I think you could build something more lightweight using Hidden Markov Models.)
Although the author appears to be of Indian descent, I think this is just a case of "Silicon Valley Tech Bro Discovers Localization," particularly since he noted he didn't know the word "transliteration." YouTube downloader sites have recognized "d,jd,f" (the wrong-keyboard moonspeak for يوتيوب) as meaning "YouTube" since forever and include this term intentionally in hand-written SEO keyword lists, indicating pretty clearly that it's not just the Google algorithm familiar with this sort of mistake. It's a problem we don't really face in the monolingual English world, but in any region with digraphia, it's just a fact of everyday life. See also the related phenomenon of mojibake, when a computer screws up the text encoding rather than a human.
Typos could be automatically discovered and indexed one word at a time by watching users search the wrong word (wrong input method) and then search again with the correct input method.
This would be my guess, query reformulations (user rewriting their query after first doesn’t work for them) is very common technique that search engines look through search logs to learn (mis)spellings.
Keyboard layout mismatches are common enough that I assume Google has a layout detection stage hardcoded just like they have typo correction hardcoded. And the creators of said algorithms probably understand very well how they work. (The naïve way would be to convert from every possible layout to every other layout, but I think you could build something more lightweight using Hidden Markov Models.)