[Radiant] Excluding pages from search results

[john]

I'm using the search extension and the Radiant 0.6.3 gem. I see that  
I can set it to exclude pages like /sitemap/,/feed/ etc. and that  
works fine.

Now I decided to exclude a whole section of my site. I tried adding  
the top level page of the section I want to exclude like /section- 
name/,/sitemap/ etc but it appears this mechanism is only for  
individual pages. So, I tried this on my search results page:

     ...
       <r:unless_content part="no-search">
       <r:search:results>
         <ul>
           <r:search:results:each><li><r:link/></li></ 
r:search:results:each>
         </ul>
       </r:search:results>
       </r:unless_content>
     ...

and then added a no-search page part to some pages and cleared the  
page cache, but those pages still appear in the results.

Is this problem a limitation in the current search extension or am I  
just missing something obvious?

thanks,
john