In Leopard, it was simple to get rid of without breaking Finder search. Not so, in Snow Leopard.

This is a “pro” tip, and something that the average user should not do at all. It will likely end up causing a mini-disaster at some point down the road. I’ve personally seen the confusion between “what’s the app and what’s the alias” cause enormous troubles many times before (even in people who consider themselves “pro” users). The average person doesn’t even fully understand the difference between the icon on the dock and the app.

Signs and labels exist for a reason. Use with caution

Chris:
aliases are much more than shortcuts…which you briefly mentioned—the links are maintained and, for the most part they are treated exactly like the original file, this is significantly different than shortcuts.

You should post an article on how to disable spotlight. Forever. Its very nice. Just move or delete the spotlight(leopard) or mds(snow leopard) plist in LaunchAgents(or was it Daemons?). Reboot or tell launchd to refresh.

In snow leopard you need to remove Search.bundle in coreservices to get rid of the spotlight icon on the top right of the screen. But this screws up non-indexed search in the finder. Maybe there’s a better way to do this. I’d like to know how to do this without destroying Finder search, if it’s possible.