gistfile1.txt

curl -PUT 'http://localhost:9320/my_twitter1/' -d '{
{                     
    "settings": {
        "number_of_shards": 1,
        "number_of_replicas": 0
    },
    "mappings": {
        "tweet" : {
            "properties" : {
                "user" : {"type" : "string", "index" : "not_analyzed"},
                "message" : {"type" : "string", "null_value" : "na", "index" : "analyzed", "analyzer" : "whitespace"},
                "postDate" : {"type" : "date"}
            }
        }
    }
}'


curl -PUT 'http://localhost:9320/my_twitter1/tweet/1' -d '{
    "user" : "kimchy",
    "post_date" : "2011-09-20T16:20:00",
    "message" : "I was trying to use elastic search"
}'



curl - GET 'http://localhost:9320/my_twitter1/_search?pretty=true' -d '{
"query": {
    "query_string": {
      "default_field": "message",
      "query": "was"
  }
}}'

Yes, this works fine for me. The code you pasted has several structure problems, the first creation of the index is a malformed json, and the last request the GET needs to come right after the -. Maybe you are not refreshing?