I was recently asked if I know how to force search engines to display the description meta tag in the search results rather than the section of the text that matched the customers query.
For Example, he elaborated, his meta description is "Buy Hot New PC Games". Elsewhere in the context of the page appears the text "pg game information", and someone has gone to Google and searched for "pg game information", they would prefer to have their site listed with their meta description "Buy Hot New PC Games" next to it.
I couldn't help but laugh. After all, Google and other search engines have spent years, and millions of dollars trying to get away from this very thing.
It used to be that all search engines used the meta descriptions. Go back and checkout WebCrawler in the earlier years, and you'll see website descriptions looked more like the link sales section of DP than any real search results.
Somewhere along the way, Google decided that given the freedom to provide their own website descriptions, website owners couldn't be trusted to provide a reliable description of what the website actually contained. Search results would deteriorate into nothing more than spam filled, often deceitful, promotional slang phrases.
The bottom line is that Google, along with other successful modern day search engines are not worried about what you, the website owner, desired the search results to be. They are much more worried about what the searchers desired results are. A search engine's number one priority is giving the searcher content that most closely matches their search. They can't trust webmasters to provide that in the meta description, so they rely on, you know, your actual content.
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