Does the search in Finder need spotlight? I just reinstalled OS X Lion and turned off the spotlight immediately.

I noticed that search in Finder stopped working. Is this because of disabling spotlight? Is there a way to get this back without turn spotlight on? I only need to search by file names.
Finder's search, as well as many other programs (Alfred, Outlook, etc.) use Spotlight's index files. If you have Spotlight shut off, you won't be able to get Finder search working natively.

There are a few free third party apps that you can use to search for files without using Apple's system:


Find Any File
EasyFind


These two do not use spotlight's index files and should work independently.