heini - 3:14 pm on Dec 13, 2002 (gmt 0)

I usually find descriptions being drawn from the meta tag on the page.
Many pages which don't have the meta desc set don't show anything at ATW.
So, why and in which cases Fast uses the ODP description, I can't tell.

There has however been always a connection between Fast results and ODP.
You could see how it worked when ATW still displayed the Topics. The taxonomy of those topics was based on the categorial structure of the ODP.