Within 4 minutes you received the correct reply:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/54264/search-doesnt-...

"how" and "to" are stop words, so they're stripped from your search.

In the tag box on the create new question form it tells you to use the tag "bug":

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask

I have no idea why editing your profile failed, but it works fine for me.

Your accounts were not automatically associated because Area 51 is new and does not auto-associate with the other sites yet.