1. A method comprising: modifying, using one or more processors, a query string of characters using a set of heuristics; performing, using one or more processors, a character-by-character comparison of the modified query string with at least one known string of characters in a corpus in order to locate an exact match for the modified query string; and responsive to not finding an exact match for the modified query string in the corpus, performing, by one or more processors, the following steps in order to locate an equivalent for the modified query string: forming a plurality of sub-strings of characters from the modified query string, the sub-strings having varying lengths such that at least two of the formed sub-strings differ in length, each sub-string comprising a composition of characters selected based on a frequency of occurrence of the composition in the modified query string; and using an information retrieval technique on the sub-strings formed from the modified query string to identify a known string of characters equivalent to the query string.