jQuery.ajax Not Populating responseText

I have built the following function to make a search query against my server with jQuery's ajax call:

function searchProducts(keywords,container,clicker,exclude){
	/*
	 * @param keywords - words in the title of the category
	 * @param retContainer - the container for the results
	 * @param clickHandler - function to handle clicking of links returned
	 * @param exclude - a list of excluded category IDs
	 */
	var data = 'query=' + encodeURIComponent(keywords) + '&clicker=' + clicker;
	if(typeof exclude == undefined)data = data + '&exclude=' + exclude;
	else data = data + '&exclude='
	var rethtml = jQuery.ajax({
		url:'/index.cfm?action=admin:products.search',
		dataType:'html',
		data:data,
		asynch:false,
		type:'GET'
	}).responseText;
	container.html(rethtml);
	
	return true;
}

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The ajax makes the call just fine and if i open firebug I can see the request and the HTML that it returned, but for some reason the responseText variable isn't being populated.  Can anyone see an error with my function call?