It would be much more user friendly if some sort of message appeared, like "Your search on {search term} returned zero results." If you can then suggest some related terms for possible searches, that would be lovely, but I would be happy just seeing it return some sort of feedback to the client. As it currently stands, it's hard to tell if the search yielded zero results or if something is broken.
Yeah this would be great! You should also have a generic empty state when someone selects a filter which results in 0 ideas shown.