Re:Flaky and Unreliable
You are correct that three letter words don't return results. Some search engines can let you set the minnimum word size that the indexer will use. I am not certain if you can do that with tiki, but it would increase the search engine load/index space.
I have not tried the file upload, but do use the image upload, and have not had a problem. I did have an issue with RSS feeds and a 'fopen' command failing with out giving an error message. I am wondering if the size of the file or a timeout error could be occuring that is not reported. Maybe you could check the php settings for file uploads.