diff --git a/libnautilus-private/nautilus-search-engine-simple.c b/libnautilus-private/nautilus-search-engine-simple.c
index 3579023..10802bc 100644
--- a/libnautilus-private/nautilus-search-engine-simple.c
+++ b/libnautilus-private/nautilus-search-engine-simple.c
@@ -109,6 +109,10 @@ search_thread_data_new (NautilusSearchEngineSimple *engine,
 	g_queue_push_tail (data->directories, location);
 	
 	text = nautilus_query_get_text (query);
+	if (text == NULL) {
+		text = g_strdup ("");
+	}
+
 	normalized = g_utf8_normalize (text, -1, G_NORMALIZE_NFD);
 	lower = g_utf8_strdown (normalized, -1);
 	data->words = g_strsplit (lower, " ", -1);
