• Search Newz, Friday, January 4, 2008 1:45 PM

Richard Burckhardt explains how each of the search engines uses a page's meta-description data a bit differently to come up with the short description that shows up on a SERP.

Google seems to primarily use the meta-description data -- but will grab a sentence or phrase containing the keyword in its absence, and MSN does the same. Meanwhile, Yahoo typically uses the meta-description tag together with snippets of the keyword-containing sentence in most cases. Yahoo will also search for a Yahoo Directory listing description, and all three will resort to using DMOZ description data if nothing else is available.

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