Well you need to be careful when excluding both categories and tags. Since a post can be associated with both there is potential that you have excluded all your posts because they are either members of excluded categories or members or excluded tags.
Only the parent Page itself is excluded from searches. By default WordPress does not yet include Pages in search. Make sure you have other search plugins correctly configured to not search attachments.
At the time (version 1.6.1) the plugin only effects Pages included in the traditional Search feature on a site. It does not trap all selections of Pages via other internal WordPress functions...yet!




