My experience is that clearing browsing data only gives temporary relief for the various performance issues in Opera.
For this particular problem I added a Google tile to my speed dial. I just click on that to open google.com then do my search from there.
To be honest though, between this issue, the annoying startup sound that can't be turned off, and the slowly growing list of sites that just don't work right with Opera... I'm thinking of just dropping it and switching to something else as my primary browser. A real shame after over 15 years using Opera as my main browser.