Elasticsearch returning inconsistent data

[Veshnu_Ramakrishnan]

I have an index which stores user information. On one side I am updating the index with changes. The other side I am search user with display name. I have a problem now.
Say { "name": "gOz7nH2Sk3242342"}. Then i change it to { "name": "gOz7nH2Sk8ethXV4"}. I started a client which in a loop searches for the prefix "gOz7nH".
My response goes.
{ "name": "gOz7nH2Sk3242342"}
{ "name": "gOz7nH2Sk8ethXV4"}
{ "name": "gOz7nH2Sk3242342"}
{ "name": "gOz7nH2Sk8ethXV4"}
{ "name": "gOz7nH2Sk8ethXV4"}

I don't understand. For a moment I get the old data and then it returns the new data. Where is this inconsistency coming from?

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

By default Elasticsearch takes up to one second to make indexed data available for search. However this is a setting applied to each shard. So if you are hitting shard0 first,. which had already done that refresh, but the second search hits a copy of that shard which has not, you may encounter this situation. You could try to alleviate this with the refresh=wait_for setting when indexing data.

--Alex