1. An apparatus, comprising: a processor circuit; a character set converter application operative on the processor circuit to receive a search string over a network from a requesting device, the search string comprised of one or more first character set characters, and convert the first character set characters of the search string to one or more second character set characters, the second character set different from the first character set; an index server operative to execute a search on the second character set search string to obtain one or more ranked individual search results, the search executed against a search database comprised of first and second character set characters; and a ranking application operative on the index server to compare any first character set characters in the ranked individual search results to the first character set characters in the search string, and sub-rank the ranked individual search results based on a match strength between the first character set characters of the search string and the first character set characters of the individual search results.