hi, so witht he 3 charater or less restriction..... how does one search for "BMW X5"?

I would do:

www.google.com/?q=site:avic411.com+bmw+x5

It's not so much a site "restriction" as a database limitation. If you could do 2 or 3 character searches it would make mysql (the database) look through ~250k posts to find 2 or 3 matching characters. It's not practical.

Lets say someone searched for common words like "the" "it" "jpg" etc, it would be bad... that many results would probably run the server out of RAM.

Google works in a completely different way and thus is able to search down to a single character.

Why are all the intra-site hyperlinks dead? Whenever I click on a link in a forum message, all I get is an error like this: "[#404] Sorry, we could not locate the page you are requesting to view. Please click here to return to the community index"

This is really making the forums almost useless since I can't even search by topic or thread number.

Why are all the intra-site hyperlinks dead? Whenever I click on a link in a forum message, all I get is an error like this: "[#404] Sorry, we could not locate the page you are requesting to view. Please click here to return to the community index"

 

This is really making the forums almost useless since I can't even search by topic or thread number.

I'm not aware of any issues, can you provide an example?

Ohhhh I see what you mean... The old /forum/viewtopic links got broken with the latest update. I'll get them fixed ASAP.

Fixed!