I'm writing some scripts for our sales people to query an index with elastic search through python. (Eventually the script will update lead info in our Salesforce DB.)
I have been using the urllib2 module, with simplejson, to pull results. The problem is that this seems to be a not-so-good approach, evidenced by scripts which are taking longer and longer to run.
Questions:

Does anyone have any opinions (opinions, on the internet???) about Elastic Search clients for Python? Specifically, I've found pyes and pyelasticsearch, via elasticsearch.org---how do these two stack up?
How good or bad is my current approach of dynamically building the query and running it via self.raw_results = simplejson.load(urllib2.urlopen(self.query))?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!
We use pyes. And its pretty neat. You can there go with the thrift protocol which is faster then the rest service.
Elastic search client for Python: advice?