When I index something in Elasticsearch, why doesn't it show in my search straight after?

I got burnt by this little architectural nuance in Elasticsearch recently. While batch processing items in a content store, updating their status, then searching for more items, I kept getting stale data and didn’t understand why. It turned out that Elasticsearch is _near_ realtime, with a default 1s refresh interval. So if you index and query within a second, you’re going to see old data. The best way around this is to do a refresh on the index just before you access it to make sure you have the latest data.