If you're creating a custom configure widget with connectConfigure, you might want to store the Search Parameters that the widget updates in the URL. You could Manually Rewrite your URL's to store the Search Parameters of your custom configure widget in the URL.
This CodeSandBox shows you how you can access the uiState on page load via search.initialUiState followed by your index name, configure. In this example we are using the distinct parameter.
In the CodeSandBox, within the isFirstRender function, we set
widgetParams.searchParameters.distinct
to conditionally equal
search._initialUiState.instant_search_test.configure.distinct
if its present or "false" if it's not.
This way we handle if the search parameters for distinct are present and set distinct to false in cases where it is not.