The article by Nik Everett discusses the mechanics and implications of the "refresh" process in Elasticsearch, which is essential for making changes to documents available for search after they have been written to disk. While Elasticsearch automatically performs refreshes at regular intervals, when the indexing buffer is full, or on demand, each method has its own advantages and drawbacks. For applications where immediate searchability post-update is critical, forcing a refresh is an option but can lead to inefficiencies due to the creation of small index segments. The upcoming Elasticsearch 5.0 offers a hybrid solution with the ?refresh=wait_for option, allowing changes to become searchable without immediate segment inefficiency, although it requires waiting for the refresh cycle to complete. The article emphasizes choosing a refresh strategy that balances the need for search immediacy with the performance impacts of index segment creation and the specific requirements of the application in use.