Google Software Update for Mac causing high CPU? Kill it.

For some strange reason, Google insists that any Mac user running their apps (Google Earth, Picassa, etc.) must also constantly run the Google Software Update daemon. They install it silently in the background without asking and I have found this incredibly difficult to permanently delete, it keeps coming back! And worse, it sometimes can get stuck in a mode where it's churning the CPU on my Macbook causing the fan to come on and the battery to be eaten up quickly. Very annoying!
You can always go into Activity Monitor and kill it (or do it via the Terminal console), but it doesn't permanently get rid of it. I recently found a way to silence it permanently (even though it's still technically there).

To disable Google Software Update from checking for updates, execute the following in the Terminal application:

defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0

If for some reason you prefer not to completely disable it, but to lengthen the time interval between the checks, you can use the following command:

defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval [n]

Where [n] is the elapsed time (in seconds) between checks. 

After years of just killing the app in Activity Monitor whenever the CPU went high because of the updater, I recently found a Google article which gave the above tip and also shows how to manually perform an update if you want.

http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer=147176