The way Elasticsearch is going though looks promising. With sorted indices, single mapping type and the other changes we might give it another try after switching to Algolia.
Is there a safe way now to query Elasticsearch directly without the need to go via proxy scripts on the server? This just adds so much overhead to the queries compared to Algolia.
I can not give a timeframe, but it is one of the top features on the ES roadmap. :)
Source: I am an engineer working on this feature.
This works pretty well already if you are running on your own hardware and have a good network. We've been running a three data center setup across the US for four years. Next year we may extend it across the Atlantic.
https://greg.blog/2014/01/09/scaling-elasticsearch-part-1-ov...
But querying from a publicly facing front end would be a poor idea - would you expose a database directly to the front end?
It is a fantastic idea to call the index directly from the frontend and could be solved with a read only type of index or api key with read only scope.
The current design with an unnecessary security layer outside of Elasticsearch is a poor idea adding too much administrative overhead and ridiculous latency.