In this circumstance there isn’t much you could do as it is the underlying Verse function you’re calling that is timing out. As a few other users have pointed out, you could go and re-tag content so that you have fewer matches. Then you could request groups of things one tag at a time.
I also reported the timeout problem internally to get more eyes on it. I can’t report on any long term solutions or future language changes. However, in the short term we’re going to be extending the timeout duration for Verse scripts. This should greatly reduce the amount of times people hit this brick wall. That change should be rolled out very soon, assuming it hasn’t already been released.