Different kind of outputs while doing simple one word searched

Question

When I just type java in the SO search box, I get the page with all question tagged java with link to it's tag wiki, top users on the top i.e. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java, and the search box has the search-word parsed as [java]. But when I search for sybase, I don't see a similar page for sybase, but I see a result that did a search to find the string sybase in various posts i.e. https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=sybase.

Same thing as java occurs for facebook, bash. And same scenario as described for sybase occurs for sed, vi.

So, is it something that popular tags as per SO get's recognized and leads to directly the tag page, and others go as the simple search page ?

Please clarify on this.

Answer 1

When you search for a sequence of letters which is also a tag, you are redirected to the tag page if the tag is popular.

To find out the definition of popular, I binary searched the tag list (assuming the threshold must be within the first 5 pages). And it looks like the top 120 tags are considered popular.

So at the moment c#-4.0 is the last.