exclude categories from search results

Question

I have the following function, I need to exclude categories from it because it works across the site in several different places. How can I do that?

// allCategories(): return an array of categories to browse in heirarchy
public function allCategories() {
    $return = array();
    if ($this->category) {
      $return = $this->catList($this->section->term_id);
    } 
      return $return;
  }           
}

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

In case it helps someone else, this was a much easier fix than I thought. I simply added the category ids to exclude to the query_posts argument, e.g., query_posts("s=$s&cat=-415,-504&posts_per_page=-1");