Mark Parnell <we*******@clar kecomputers.com .au> wrote:
Certain search
engines will sometimes display the contents of the description meta
tag in the results (usually only when there's little or no relevant
content on the page)
It can be worse than that. Here's a Google hit I found recently:
EUROPA - Perustuslaki
Content should be a sentence or two that describes the content of the
page in the language of the document.
europa.eu.int/constitution/index_fi.htm
Quite impressive, is it not? The "excerpt" has been taken directly from a
meta tag. The page content is in Finnish, contrary to the metababble
<meta name="Language" content="en"> and the claim
<html lang="en">. Other meta tags are nonsense.
If the European Union, with rather massive resources, can't do better,
it is unlikely that search engines have reasonable motivation to make
use of meta tags (even at the current modest level). After all,
even if meta tags aren't intentionally misleading, they are often simply
wrong due to incompetence or carelessness. (Even if a meta tag is originally
adequate in principle, its content often remains unchanged even if the page
changes so substantially that the metadata should be updated too.)
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html 
