Beating quota system in India

At present there seems to be a mad rush among people to get their caste registered under a reserved category to get the benefits doled out by government. Since politically this quota system ensures vote banks, no government in power is looking at the long term impact this stupid way of reservation will have on the overall growth of the nation.
When in the 50s, caste based reservation was introduced, the plan was to revisit the list of castes every 5 years or so and make changes,i.e add new ones and remove older ones which have benefited. The 2nd part, removing castes from lists, never happened and the list just kept getting bigger and bigger. Of course not every citizen supports or believes this caste based reservations but there seems to be no way to stop this menace.

I have thought of a way to beat this stupidity. It's an appeal to all the intelligent people (students, parents, guardians) who happen to belong to a reserved category and are not availing the reservations thinking that it is morally wrong to seek reservation and think that they are doing society good by fighting out in the general category - START USING QUOTA. Sounds silly - read on.

What you are doing is - you are allowing one seat from the reserved category to be given to a non-merit guy and fighting for the general unreserved category. Since you are intelligent you will anyways get the seat but you are increasing competition in the general category. Instead if you use quota you will take the seat reserved for your caste and allow one more general category brilliant student like you take up the general seat. This way in a bigger scheme of things you are ensuring that the overall pool (reserved as well as unreserved) of seats gets better, since all intelligent people are joining.

Think about it and let me know your thoughts. This to me seems to be a nice way to beat the system. 

Enough of SEO menace

I was just wondering about the whole stupidity of Google/Bing search results, SEO and stuff like that. Google displays hundreds of pages based on the search keyword given but honestly who views them? Personally I never go beyond 3^rd or 4rth page and so do people I know of. I am sure most other users would also be doing the same – why then Google displays so many result pages?

I know technically they are doing the right thing – if you have a page and it’s indexed then based on PR it will be shown but what is the relevance of that. Since users focus only on first 5-6 pages max – a host of dummy approaches called SEO has come up. Everyone know that to come up in the first few pages they have to write content according to the way Google identifies them. So if you take a birds eye view of this whole thing what you see is a company which uses some logic to display hundreds of pages based on some rank and then all the page owners manipulate their pages according to that logic to appear there.

So what does a genuinely good page owner who does not know SEO do? Isn’t this whole search engine thing meant to show relevant pages only sans SEO? I know it’s tough to decide what a good page is and what is not but then if they cannot find a good reason why do they claim themselves to be the best. It’s been so many years since Google came into existence – at the early time what it did made sense, since there was no other way to search those pages. But now they should innovate – if they cannot then better make it public. Why guide the whole bunch of net users towards a stupid concept called SEO.

I know it would sound silly but I have a practical solution to this. To start with, search engines should stop keeping a log of all search keywords being typed by users. Or make the search display part very crude and simple like yellow pages – where the user knows results are stored in an alphabetical order. Imagine yellow pages having places listed based on some algorithm called “relevance to users” . Suppose I am looking for a Mr Smith – then first it will list all Smiths who are very popular in their localities. To start with it sounds good but imagine after some time when people know this they start some campaign or the other to become popular for nothing – then the listing goes for a toss. Since in the mean time people have got used to checking for only the top 10 Smiths – they end up finding a fraud guy. Then yellow pages devises another algorithm to fix that – which the fraud guys again manipulate and this goes on. In the process the actual good Smiths are just plain clueless what is going on and they remain quiet and slip further down.

So in this whole process of value addition what finally happened was value subtraction. Instead if the yellow page guys had thought of adding some value in the data that is shown alongside the name that would have been really useful. Users know that data is presented in a predefined order,i.e alphabetically and alongside the name some info is given which is optimized to make it more relevant for the person searching it.

Similarly – Google should just have a straight logic of result display else just remain out of this thought of relevant searching.