I was really starting to hate the "Quick" or "Real Time" search feature but just before I posted a complaint, I had one more look at the options. No option to turn it off, BUT THEN - I noticed something I skipped over and that is the "Search as you type delay". Set that to 10,000 ms, (10 secs), and that is as good as disabling. Yeah, now I don't have to wait every time I type three characters while Evernote searches through the thousands of notes and GB of data looking for, compiling and displaying a long list of notes that have the 3 characters I typed. Wish I had realized this months ago.