Thanks James for the insight.
With your thoughts and a search through the forum notes I see now that it looks like ES real time search is a kind of batch process happening every 1 sec or so, and that "refresh" is probably too expensive to do for every small update/insert (if the system has very large number of changes etc).
This was very helpful. I think if I can give some immediate front end UI feedback to the user for messages/docs he updates or creates (i.e. remove or add to list in GUI depending on tags) then it doesn't matter how long the back end system takes to merge that change into the indexes for other people to see or a new search.
Thanks,
Zoz