meta description info

blank meta description?

[evinrude]

Our current website wasn't built with any SEO in mind. However, we're redesigning the site basically from scratch (ok...content is recycled, but completely different html) I noticed today, that in all of the new code we've done, that one of my coders has replaced my descriptive "meta descriptions" with <meta name="description" content="" />. I'm assuming it's a search and replace gone awry.

Easy enough to fix before the site goes live. However, it's got me curious what the results would have been. Meta descriptions are usually used as the descriptive text below each result, correct? Not having this tag would generally result in the first few lines being used as desciptors, if I recall correctly.

What would this code have done to search engine results on pages that contained it?