This may be a stupid question, but is there a reason that artist aliases aren't automatically made into tag implications? For example, on the wiki page for the artist Qualzar (https://e621.net/artists/22171), it lists her aliases, such as "Pankaeks" and "Pockatiel". For instances like this, why doesn't searching "Pockatiel" give the same results as searching "Qualzar"? Should I put in a request for a tag implication, or are artist aliases not supposed to have implications?

Aliases and implications aren't different. When you have an implication for tag A -> B, the tag B is added along side tag A, so when a user tags A on a post, it will end up with both A and B. When you have an alias for tag A -> B, tag A is replaced with tag B, so when a user tags A on a post, it will end up with tag B instead of A (and when someone searches for tag A, it will get results for tag B instead). For an artist that has different names, you'd use an alias since the names would all be for the same artist.

As for why they're not automatically made, different artists can sometimes be known by the same name. For instance, two different artists may be known by "orion", like glacierclear and pax_(artist). Or someone can have a name that is also a normal tag, like [rottentribute]] also being known as "brick". Having them as other names in the artist page helps people find the right tag when searching artists, but having aliases made automatically would create bad or ambiguous aliases in some instances, so they need to be done manually with proper curation. And many times, an alias isn't needed when an artist's other name(s) may be obscure. An alias is only needed when there's a good chance for people to erroneously use different tags for the same artist and split up their work.