Understanding Wifi Usages i live in a rural area and my internet provider is satellite.  When my son is downloading a movie and the wheel beside wifi icon is spinning and spinning is that using wifi data? It could take a half hour before the movie downloads. He is constantly trying to download and eventually gets it.  He is saying no data is used in searching. I do not agree. I think searching is using data. Am I correct?  As long as that wheel is spinning you are using data.
The menu bar and application spinners are very indirect / poor ways to see if network traffic is flowing. They can indicate a dropped connection, stalled data connection if a request was made and not aknowledged.

You would do best to log in to your router and see a traffic graph. If that's not feasible, you can also open Activity Monitor on the Mac.

There is a network activity graph that shows packets per second and bandwidth in real time.

Basically - when someone says "no data is used when I search" the correct answer is - "great, go ahead and disconnect from WiFi while you search since you don't need data to do that". It's possible the data exchanged during search / navigation is low, but it's not going to be no data.