That essay misses the point its trying to refute. It references Chomsky talking about the nature of language and by extension the human mind. It then turns to talking about how search engines work, which is an unrelated topic.

On the other hand, if your idea of "the nature of language" doesn't include how listeners understand a statement then you are probably not thinking about the nature of language.

Human minds are not search engines. They do not run code.

Norvig's essay references Chomsky literally talking about "trying to apply statistical models to various linguistic problems", which is surely what today's search engines do.

It does, but the fact that search engines use statistical models has no overlap with how human language faculties work.