Removing spotlight icon from menu bar persistently

I tried to remove spotlight form the menu bar with the following trick:

sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
killall SystemUIServer

Unfortunately if I repair disk permissions and reboot at some point (or just simply reboot some people tell me), the annoying spotlight thing is back in the menu bar.

I don't want to disable spotlight, just to take off the damn magnifying glass from the menu bar persistently. Is there a way the works better than the one I presented above?

This works at least up to 10.9.2.

To disable:

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle.bak
killall SystemUIServer

To re-enable:

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle.bak /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle
killall SystemUIServer

There are a few apps that can remove the icon for you, I used Bartender to check it works in Mountain Lion:

It will even get rid of Notification Center if you so desire ;)