Google and Lok Sabha -- do we have something in common?
Alrite both are Giants in there own right but is there anything else that we do have in common.
I think we do.
A few days ago i read that maharashtra had a voting percentage of just 40% ,the thing that shocked me with this was that maharashtra was a state recently attacked.I had a feeling that people would come out in large numbers to decide the fate of the state and that of the country.I was wrong and 60 people out of every 100 didn't care to vote.
I sat there reading my newspaper and thinking ,why didn't we vote ?
Why is it that youth of our country is disillusioned with the whole process of democracy ?
All those candle marches and protests appeared to be pseudo ,as when the time came to enforce a change we pulled ourselves out of the process .
Ok all these questions wanted an answer and i started discussing it with my room mates.After a long discussion the unanimous answer was "Mere ek ke vote se kya fark pad jaega???"(How much difference will one vote of mine make?).Ok fair enough.In a country of more then a billion, do i really matter?? That answer set me thinking for a solution.
Being a techie i looked for some technological solution to this and guess what?? i found it in GOOGLE.:) (it really searches everything).Although this time i had to read the technical design of Google's architecture to find a solution but still it was Google that gave me the answer.
Ok I'll start with Google's relation with democracy.
In the 90s search engines used to search solely on the basis of meta tags(these are the tags that tell about the keywords in the page).Suppose i have a page that deals with cricket so my meta tags will be like "ball","six","boundary","wicket" ,"bold" ,"tendulkar" etc.Now a search engine used to look for maximum matches in the meta tags and ranked the page accordingly.But web pages started misusing it.
Suppose a cricket world cup is approaching so the web page will put the keywords related to cricket in its meta tags (content will have nothing to do with cricket --it might be a shaadi.com page).So the developers exploited this loophole and search engines came up with all sort of weird results(shaadi,cookery ,pottery and what not) instead of cricket pages.
Thats where Google cashed in,They came up with an analogy that a person can lie about his credentials but other people in his locality won't lie about his credentials which is similar to a scenario where a web page can lie about its content(by giving misleading meta tags) but the other pages on the net won't lie about it.So if a page is REALLY good there will be other pages on the web that will be voting for its good content.
For example suppose we open yahoo.com and on the homepage we find an advertisement for naukri.com,so the fact that yahoo lets naukri.com stay on its homepage means that yahoo is voting for naukri.com.and the fact that yahoo is itself voted by millions of other web pages makes yahoo's vote that much more important.So the fact is ,million of pages voted for yahoo and yahoo voted for naukri.com.Now that makes naukri.com a really good web page.
Another real life analogy will be -suppose a company has to make a decision,now there are 1000 freshers(just joined the company) and one CEO thats going to take part in the decision.now the 1000 freshers say that we should choose option A,but CEO says we should chose option B.In Google's version of democracy it will be ceo's option that will be chosen because he has the vote of thousands of other employees who say that we trust your decision making abilities.
So its more of a weighted democracy kind of thing,which depends on the credentials of a person and these credentials will decide his voting power.In this kind of democracy a person like APJ Kalam might have a vote that has thousand points and a person who is into any sort of anti social activity will have a single vote or he might not have a say at all.
It is basically down to the individual weight age of a person's vote.This phenomenon can be visualized as follows
There is a village with 100 people ,99 are goons and 1 is an intellect and a visionary(named Mr Brilliant).Lok sabha elections are nearing and Mr Yadav is standing in the elections.Voting power of 99 goons is 1 point each and voting power of Mr Brilliant is 100 points .Now Mr yadav has to convince this village.If he tries the conventional way(bribes,gifts,liquor ) to get the village votes,he will at most get 99 votes of 1 point each.but our Mr Brilliant will not give in to these tactics of Mr Yadav.So a single vote of Mr Brilliant can decide the fate of our village.The other case is if Mr Yadav has to convince Mr Brilliant he has to do real development,he has to fight on real economic issues ,he simply has to perform in order to get Mr Brilliants vote.
So applying this algorithm we can give a message to our youths that you have a say in the elections and when a young man will feel that his vote can make difference.I think he'll come out to make that difference.
Google implemented democracy on the web after tweaking a little with the concept of democracy,now i think we should be taking a clue from Google's implementation of democracy.May be we don't do it at the national level .Let's start with the panchayat level elections and see for the implementation of this new version of democracy.
I think it should work.... it works magic for Google :)
Note-
1)Google uses a page rank algorithm to rank its pages voting power,what algorithm will we use to rank our voters.(thinking over it ---suggestions please)
2)I am making edits to a concept(democracy) that has been working for last hundreds of years,Please correct me if i am overlooking any strengths of democracy.(which i am sure i am).
