Nope, no "never index" file. It's my understanding, though, that searching by name doesn't use the index, so I'm not sure that'd matter anyway.
Well that must be wrong, because then the never index trick wouldn't work. We can also blind Spotlight on the individual folder level, by adding the extension
.noindex to a folder's name.
And it makes sense from a "metadata" point of view that —for a rigid program like Spotlight —searching its index for file names is much faster than scanning directory trees (as all other utilities must do). But i agree —from a practical use point of view —it would be
nice if Spotlight didn't require an index for name searches... but i don't believe that's the case.
Can anyone link to conclusive proof one way or the other?
Furthermore — even assuming that Spotlight
does fallback to doing a "regular" filename search when no index is available (e.g., a CD/ROM or something), i think that the
mere presence of an index (which you said your drives definitely have) would preempt that fallback behavior.
