Google is using my description meta tag

are meta tags used under certain conditions

[allonline]

Noticed this the other day, had seen it for a while but it had not clicked on what I was seeing.

When I seach for my url to see how many pages listed my url
www.myurl.com page listed first but the description is exactly as in my description meta tag which I thought google didnt display even if it read it for context or some other purpose, I expected to see the first few lines of the page i.e. what was in the h1 tag, the home page link or some text from the page.

Any reasons for this, all other pages seem to show text from within the page even if its just a link to www.myurl.com.
search term would be myurl

Wondered if some coding error was forcing it to use the description tag as my site doesnt seem to be getting completely crawled lately, unfortunately the spider must have visited just before I uploaded a new validated page last night.

[conor]

Google will use the meta description and even alt tag text in the snippet if it cannot find text in the body of the page.

[WebGuerrilla]

allonline,

You might want to check out

[webmasterworld.com...]

Google will occasionaly use the meta description tag when there is normal text on the page.

It seems to show up more often between the 15th and the 25th of the month. (pre-update) It also tends to be quite random. If you do some checks across all three db's, you will often find that one will be showing the old fashioned randsom note while the others are showing the meta description.

And then when you go back and check it later, it switches.