Since we only need to retrieve by the internal ID, I think we could do without any query, search request, etc. and just do a get (see http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/java-api/current/get.html). Another option would be an idsQuery (see http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/java-api/current/query-dsl-queries.html#ids), but since we request only one document, I think even that would be overhead.