Does the search in Finder need spotlight?
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.