Django request.GET

since your form has a field called 'q', leaving it blank still sends an empty string.

try

if 'q' in request.GET and request.GET['q'] != "" :
     message
else
     error message

q = request.GET.get("q", None)
if q:
    message = 'q= %s' % q
else:
    message = 'Empty'

Calling /search/ should result in "you submitted nothing", but calling /search/?q= on the other hand should result in "you submitted u''"

Browsers have to add the q= even when it's empty, because they have to include all fields which are part of the form. Only if you do some DOM manipulation in Javascript (or a custom javascript submit action), you might get such a behavior, but only if the user has javascript enabled. So you should probably simply test for non-empty strings, e.g:

if request.GET.get('q'):
    message = 'You submitted: %r' % request.GET['q']
else:
    message = 'You submitted nothing!'