Search endpoint is slow

Needs investigation.

Calling the search endpoint takes multiple seconds, whereas it should be around 300ms.

There are likely multiple issues affecting this, but to start with using time + curl across a few envs:

Local machine (Minnesota)

real	0m0.239s
user	0m0.082s
sys	0m0.000s

AWS VM (us-west-2)

real	0m0.231s
user	0m0.052s
sys	0m0.001s

Rack 3 VM - largely variable results

real	0m1.412s
user	0m0.067s
sys	0m0.008s

real	0m0.882s
user	0m0.056s
sys	0m0.019s

real	0m0.430s
user	0m0.066s
sys	0m0.008s

real	0m1.600s
user	0m0.070s
sys	0m0.005s

Start by reproducing the search endpoint latency with time and curl across the local machine, AWS VM, and Rack 3 VM environments mentioned in the issue. Compare results with the approximately 300ms target, then trace the endpoint's request path to identify the source of the variability. Done means the cause is identified and the endpoint consistently approaches the target latency.