19. A computer-readable medium comprising program code to: modify a query string of characters using a set of heuristics; perform 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, locate an equivalent for the modified query string by 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 lengths 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.
19. A computer-readable medium comprising program code to: modify a query string of characters using a set of heuristics; perform 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, locate an equivalent for the modified query string by 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 lengths 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. 20. The computer-readable medium of claim 19 , wherein the information retrieval technique further comprises: weighting the sub-strings; scoring known strings of characters; and retrieving information associated with a known string having the highest score.