One of the main challenges of metasearch, is ensuring that the search query is compatible with the component search engines that are being federated and combined. When the search vocabulary or data model of the search system is different from the data model of one or more of the foreign target systems, the query must be translated into each of the foreign target systems. This can be done using simple data-element translation or may require semantic translation. For example, if one search engine allows for quoting of exact strings or n-grams and another does not, the query must be translated to be compatible with each search engine. To translate a quoted exact string query, it can be broken down into a set of overlapping N-grams that are most likely to give the desired search results in each search engine.