Thanks everyone! I've tried both the PHP and Ruby clients and found that documentation really pushed me towards the former. It's working out with multi_match, and the conversion from JSON array to PHP code (or reverse) is simple enough! I can send queries and put the hits on the web page!
My next step is to aggregate data from those various sites now. Has anyone tried the Elasticsearch River App to crawl for content? I've looked into some threads here that discusses web crawlers, but the last comment was from four years ago and the suggestions there are probably not the best or current.