Sounds like you're pretty much where I am.
See this thread: ElasticSearch, NetBeans, Maven and Java
It's got my notes on setting up a simple java program to use elasticsearch under NetBeans. The doco elastic gives us is less than helpful...
I'm writing code to index new data, but the only difference between that and a search should be the action call towards the end of the try loop. That's probably what I'll try next. (I did index first so I'd have something to search for. 
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