Q I do not use Spotlight, but it is clogging my logs trying to index items that cause it to crash, and otherwise making a nuisance of itself. How can I turn it off?

A The easiest way of doing this is to open its pane in System Preferences, select the Privacy tab, and drag and drop all mounted volumes into its Privacy list.

Once you have done that, it will not try indexing any of the contents of those volumes, and de facto it is turned off. It will still appear listed in the processes in Activity Monitor, but will never run, remaining cached to disk and inactive. This should also remove its hidden index files, but leave access to Spotlight’s network search features.

Comments Background services like Spotlight’s mdworker indexing tool and server mds can only be turned off through internal OS X surgery, removing them from the list of targets for OS X’s launchd process manager. If you try forcing them to quit, or when they crash, the launchd system immediately tries to restart them.

Updated from the original, which was first published in MacUser volume 30 issue 12, 2014.