[TYPO3] troubles with indexed search

[Surer Dink]

All,

I am having some problems getting indexed search to work as I would like...

1) I set "startingpoint" in the indexed_search plugin, but the entire
site still gets searched.  how can I restrict the search to only a
subsection of the site?
2) I use RealURl and my page names have ampersend (&) character.
bottom of search results says: Path: /Test & Me/About Us  - how
can I get it to say Test & Me instead?
3) All of my pages have a footer with text links, one of them is
"home".  when I search for "home" all of the pages come up.  how can I
exclude the page footers/menus from the search results?

Thank you for your help!