Yeah, I don't know if there's an easy way to do that. Each artist has a single full name, for which there is one per artist, so you can do a whole word match. There is also an artist/album cross-reference table where each entry is an artist's association with an album. When an artist is linked under an alias, these are found here, also a whole word match.
Unfortunately, the Variations are a comma separated list containing multiple variations for a single artist. We can't match whole words there. We also don't want to partial match, becuase it'll generate a ton of false positives for simple small names. There may be some SQL tricks that could be used, but I don't know if they would totally alleviate this downside.
The variation field was not designed to contain aliases anyway. It is intended for removal of the "x (as y)" clauses from the discography. People have been sticking unused aliases in there. Whenver I catch that in the queue, I do a search and link up those albums properly, since that is probably what they were trying to do anyway.
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