So I did some more digging and saw that the folks at Micro.blog incorporate a similar DuckDuckGo search bar. However, they include custom HTML & CSS to make the search bar simply elegant. Check out an example at the bottom of founder Manton Reece’s blog.
With some Custom JS & CSS, I tried to replicate this on my blog. The resulting search bar is on the bottom of my blog. It looked so good that I deleted my search app to use it instead.
Check it out and let me know if it’s something you’d like on your blog. If the demand’s there I’ll write up how I did it. Thanks to everyone again for bringing up here. I would have never redid how I did search on my blog if it wasn’t for this topic.