A method for normalizing query words in web search includes populating a dictionary with join and split candidates and corresponding joined and split words from an aggregate of query logs; determining a confidence score for join and split candidates, a highest confidence score for each being characterized in the dictionary as must-join and must-split, respectively; accepting queries with words amenable to being split or joined, or amenable to an addition or deletion of a hyphen or an apostrophe; generating, based on the accepted queries, split candidates obtained from the dictionary, and candidates of join, hyphen, or apostrophe algorithmically; and submitting to a search engine the generated possible candidates characterized as must-join or must-split in the dictionary, to improve search results returned in response to the queries; applying a language dictionary to generated candidates not characterized as must-split or must-join, to rank them, and submitting those highest-ranked to the search engine.