ElasticSearch isn't that difficult and the new guide they published a few months ago walks you through getting it set up without going too in-depth [1]. As a beginner I had it running on a $5 digitalocean droplet within a couple hours and indexed way over "a couple thousand" documents before the end of the day.
But if your needs are really that simple, MySQL does support full-text search [2].
[1] http://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/i... [2] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-search.html
I didn't know MySQL had fulltext search as well. I'll look into that. Thanks.
[1]: http://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/master/ha...
Bleve comes with a few command line utils: https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve/tree/master/utils