Why does Spotlight still call external servers even with Suggestions/Bing turned off?

While that is certainly a great read, and some of the linked articles are even better, it sidesteps my question. At issue isn't what Apple does with my search request(s), but rather, what is Spotlight doing contacting many, many outside systems when I open a Spotlight search? At one point, it had hit over 50 servers. Some of them might make sense, as they were sites that I frequent, but many of them were advertising or tracking servers. There is no reason whatsoever for Apple to provide information to those companies, or to contact them on my behalf.

Reading the discussions at the bottom of that article you provided, and at the bottom of some of the linked articles, was an eye-opener into how complacent people are about privacy. Several people contended that because Apple says they aren't giving away, selling, or otherwise exploiting our information, it must be so. "The lawyers wouldn't let them", is the common chorus. I rank that right up there with "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you".

Google and Facebook have been caught multiple times abusing customer trust. Their responses ranged from "it was unintentional" to "it was an oversight" to "customers misunderstand the privacy agreement" to "we did it before, we'll do it again as we see fit, all in the name of innovation and improving the product". Apple is my favorite company and I have a strong attachment to it, but I can't let emotion blind me to the fact that this ongoing integration of our lives with the cloud can become one vast data mining experience.