The present invention leverages iterative transformations of search query strings along with statistics extracted from search query logs and/or web data to provide possible alternative spellings for the search query strings. This provides for spell checking that can be influenced to provide individualized suggestions for each user. By utilizing search query logs, the present invention can account for substrings not found in a lexicon but still acceptable as a search query of interest. This allows for a higher quality proposal for alternative spellings, beyond the content of the lexicon. One instance of the present invention operates at a substring level by utilizing word unigram and/or bigram statistics extracted from query logs combined with an iterative search. This provides substantially better spelling alternatives for a given query than employing only substring matching. Other instances can receive input data from sources other than a search query input.