diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index cd8410d3b..2a09999d9 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -1,6 +1,9 @@
 Release 0.6.6 (in development)
 ==============================
 
+* #353: Strip leading and trailing whitespace when extracting
+  search words in the search function.
+
 
 Release 0.6.5 (Mar 01, 2010)
 ============================
diff --git a/sphinx/themes/basic/static/searchtools.js b/sphinx/themes/basic/static/searchtools.js
index e0226258a..71e175d27 100644
--- a/sphinx/themes/basic/static/searchtools.js
+++ b/sphinx/themes/basic/static/searchtools.js
@@ -296,6 +296,9 @@ var Search = {
     var tmp = query.split(/\s+/);
     var object = (tmp.length == 1) ? tmp[0].toLowerCase() : null;
     for (var i = 0; i < tmp.length; i++) {
+      // ignore leading/trailing whitespace
+      if (tmp[i] == "")
+        continue;
       // stem the word
       var word = stemmer.stemWord(tmp[i]).toLowerCase();
       // select the correct list