Hi @losbellos, this is not entirely without drawbacks (you need to disable two useful features), but you can achieve this as follows:
go to opera://flags/#news-on-startpage, and select "Disabled" from the drop-down,
go to opera://flags/#start-page-config, and select "Disabled from the drop-down,
click the "Relaunch Now" button.
After that, you should see the search icon (magnifying glass) in the upper right corner 😉