You can turn off Spotlight Indexing on Mac OSX 10.6 by following these two steps:

Step 1 – Turn off Indexing

Open up the Terminal and type in

sudo mdutil -a -i off

Hit Enter.

The Terminal will ask you for your password, type it in (you won’t see what you type so don’t worry) and hit enter again.

Step 2 – Remove the Spotlight Icon from the Menu Bar

While still in Terminal run the follwong command:

sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search

Hit Enter, and restart the Menubar with the last command:

killall SystemUIServer

Done!

Turn Indexing back on

To turn Spotlight Indexing back on open up Terminal and execute the follwoing command:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Now, to get the spotlight icon back you want to call this line in Terminal

sudo chmod 777 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search

Hit enter and restart the menu bar by executing:

killall SystemUIServer

Conclusion

Spotlight is a quite awesome feature, but you can achieve better results in case of speed and usability by using QuickSilver. QuickSilver is way faster and can do a lot more than Spotlight can. I myself disabled Spotlight, installed QuickSilvber, mapped the Shortcut to CMD + Space and there you go! And of course it’s FREE!