I think it wasn't 'ready' at that point in time, and the json based query language was closer to what we needed.

The real problem was that the data was being imported in bulk by the user, from a many-meg-sized csv . It would grind couchdb to a halt trying to build views, so having elasticsearch be a separate process that could work through it made a lot of sense.

Thanks for answering. I have used elastic search before and I was very impressed by it. Now I am trying to evaluate couchdb-lucene to see if it can prove to be a good alternative.