get_the_category returns category for a page

I was testing the search.php functionality on a theme I am hacking.
In The Loop it calls the_category() to list the categories that a post is published under e.g. “Published in Cat1, Cat2 etc”

As pages do not have categories I am calling going through get_the_category() to count the categories. If not zero then I display “Published in” and call the_category().

For one page get_the_category() says it is in the “Uncategorized” category but the_category() does not display anything.

My pseudo code inside The Loop:

$category_count = 0;
foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) { $category_count++; }
if ($category_count) { ?>
   | Published in
  <?php the_category(', ');
} ?>

PS If there is a way to determine whether the item in the loop is a post or a page then I could skip the get_the_category() check. I didn’t see any functions for this in the Template Tags codex page.