Again, saying disabling search implies there was functioning search. There wasn't.
What I had was a HTML form that would push somebody to DuckDuckGo with a site search. I think it's a pretty cool way to do search on a static (Hugo) website, let the search professionals do there thing. I can help, add keywords, alt titles (like cod for Call of Duty), having a sitemap, but let them work it out.
However this site isn't indexed by DuckDuckGo or even Google, so it doesn't work yet. I'll uncomment it out once I'm indexed.