The artist search capability makes use of aliases to improve matching, which is a good thing. However, what gets displayed to the MB user is still the base Artist name (even if an alias is an exact match), and this can lead to a different, incorrect artist being selected from the list. This was a factor in the wrong artist being chosen in this edit http://musicbrainz.org/edit/17671993 .

In this edit, look at "Jay Kay". There have been several artists in MB by this name. The most recent is http://musicbrainz.org/artist/50dcc944-b55f-4327-9748-c69e4e8821ba but it's also an alias used by Jason Kay http://musicbrainz.org/artist/0eec027c-6a95-4229-97b3-422f1888b35d . (At one point, Jay Kay was in the DB referring to Jason Kay but that entry was merged with Jason Kay before the current Jay Kay artist was created).

It would help to avoid mis-attributions if a matching alias, in this case "Jay Kay" was displayed alongside the base Artist name (here "Jason Kay") so as to inform the user that a particular artist is known by the name they were searching for. Otherwise, there's a tendency to choose an exact match and overlook an artist which could be the one they're looking for.

A different approach might be to display the alias name in the search results if it was the best match for the entered artist, and show the base artist name as a disambiguation comment. If the artist already has a disambiguation comment then it might be displayed preferentially (presuming it will suffice to clarify the identity) or both could be displayed.