Were you using it for simple grep search or actually required advanced searching for eg: BM25. Clickhouse will only help you with grep like search from what I understand.
Actually, there was no search, only on-the-fly aggregations/filtering over "big data". ES was kind of famous at the time, although not the best tool for that job.
I had the same experience recently. Turns out ClickHouse would reduce our DB operations by 60%, remove the need for a TSDB, and reduce query times from ~300-500ms (and sometimes ~3s) to roughly ~75ms. Lastly, and most impressively we were already seeing a ridiculous level of compression and our storage cost benchmarks were reduced to the cost of S3. This took a $2-3M storage layer down to one measured in the single thousands per month.
ClickHouse is no panacea but if you understand how your data is accessed and thus how to arrange it you will get so many miles out of it.
