Can this limit be removed or at the very least reduced to a sensible time period.
IIRC, searches counts as making posts and follows the same wait time for different ranks. The purpose of this is probably to prevent spamming and protect the software. Even with the wait time you can still make hundreds of searches per day, which is reasonably fair for every user.
If you wish to reduce the wait time, you could;
• Wait to rank up,
• Get whitelisted, by buying copper membership,
• Get whitelisted by a forum member who can manually do it.