[mukmuk]

I disabled both Spotlight Suggestions and Bing yet Spotlight -- via SpotlightNetHelper -- still attempts to connect to api.smoot.apple.com:443 and wu.apple.com:80.

Can anyone explain this?

[pilsetnieks]

Location services?

Edit: I think that you have to disable Location service for Spotlight separately in Privacy settings.

[mukmuk]

Good thought, but I disabled that too. Edit: Twitter discussion regarding one of these issues. Note that Spotlight is doing this despite all relevant settings disabled (spotlight suggestions, bing, privacy, and logging).

https://twitter.com/marczak/status/481818945318428673

[pilsetnieks]

wu.apple.com is an address associated with location service requests. If you've disabled location for spotlight, it's possible that it was something else requesting the location.

No idea about that smoot thing, though.

[blantonl]

A quick fix would be to add wu.apple.com to your hosts file with an address of 127.0.0.1 - not long term and certainly not an overall fix.