While i haven't done scientific testing of this, I was able to run up to 3-4 instances of my search script prior at a time before it told me to enhance my calm. Now I'm barely able to run one without hitting the limit. I can put delays in my code to slow it down, but I'm wondering if this is just a symptom of the aftermath of the DDoS attack or something else? My server has a dedicated IP and no one else runs code from it, so it isn't other people on my IP hitting the Search API.
Maybe I need to talk about Search API whitelisting... dave http://webecologyproject.org