That's what I thought too, but didn't disable it. Now I've found that it's great when you're searching within a file, because you can see the search matches hi

That's what I thought too, but didn't disable it. Now I've found that it's great when you're searching within a file, because you can see the search matches highlight on the minimap. The same highlighting is also great when linting files (https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeLint https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeLint) to see where errors are.