Thanks Joe for the assist and pointing out that critical bug that I will need to keep track of and will ask ESRI to escalate it as well form our organization.
The popup, there it was under the Map Widget options. I had not at all considered that was were the setting would be to define how/when pop-up interacted with the map.
For those wondering: Now search will trigger a pop-up. use actions on the Search widget to further refine how it interacts. Again this may not answer the original question of this post but it got me past this step. Thanks Community.
Not where i expected it to be...