Disabled and Hide the Spotlight Menu Icon in OS X Lion

simplepastiefile.rb

# Disable Spotlight
The primary method is using launchctl, this will require the administrative password:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Another approach is to use the older indexing method of “sudo mdutil -a -i off” which turns off indexing only, but more on that in a minute.

# Reenable Spotlight
The guaranteed way to reenable Spotlight is to reload it into launchd using launchctl:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

# Hide the Spotlight Menu Icon in OS X Lion
This does not disable Spotlight or mds, it only hides the icon from the menubar.

Launch the Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/ and type the following:

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

Next, you kill a process called SystemUIServer to refresh the menubar and have the change take effect:

killall SystemUIServer