Why is Spotlight contacting Yahoo i.e. Oath?

A very creepy thing is happening. Every time I turn on Wifi, I see a connection by Catalina's Spotlight to Yahoo's Oath service:

 Spotlight       49345 me   17u  IPv4 0x93dfe36e77e7a7ae      0t0  TCP 192.168.1.9:50976->67.195.228.57:https (ESTABLISHED)

You can get a list of all connections in Terminal by typing:

lsof +c 15 -n -i4TCP

Does anyone know why Spotlight feels it needs to contact Yahoo, which is a company I don't want to have anything to do with?

Solution 1:

Under umbrella term: "spotlight suggestions" some features like weather, flights, internet search results' preloading etc., might need Spotlight to connect to Yahoo. But the following sources suggest that it happens after the data is sent to Apple.

To make suggestions and search results more relevant, some information is sent to Apple and not associated with you

In some cases, such as when you use Siri Suggestions in Spotlight, Look Up or Safari, generalised topics of interest that Siri has learned may be sent to Apple to make your searches more relevant.

From: In-app disclaimer in System Preferences.

Since the release of Yosemite, Spotlight sends all entered queries and location information to Apple by default.

^{From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)#Privacy_concerns}

Apple's support page informs users who want to opt out of Spotlight Suggestions, Bing or Location Services for Spotlight to go to their Mac's System Preferences and deselect the corresponding checkboxes.

^{https://web.archive.org/web/20150727152056/http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-clarifies-spotlight-suggestions-data-collection-practices/}