diff --git a/src/applications/search/compiler/PhutilSearchQueryCompiler.php b/src/applications/search/compiler/PhutilSearchQueryCompiler.php
--- a/src/applications/search/compiler/PhutilSearchQueryCompiler.php
+++ b/src/applications/search/compiler/PhutilSearchQueryCompiler.php
@@ -104,7 +104,7 @@
   private function tokenizeQuery($query) {
     $maximum_bytes = 1024;
 
-    $query_bytes = strlen($query);
+    $query_bytes = phutil_nonempty_string($query);
     if ($query_bytes > $maximum_bytes) {
       throw new PhutilSearchQueryCompilerSyntaxException(
         pht(