For what it's worth, I recently removed all the description meta tags, except for some code pages which have nothing on them except HTML/CSS/Javascript code, and saw no changes in any of the 4 main engines, Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Ask.
Previously, I had periodically edited each meta description tag to include search terms that people were actually searching for and it didn't effect the positions of any of the pages in any of the search engines for those terms.
That said, you wrote :
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Originally Posted by allthingsyou
What I am confused about is the fact that these keywords and phrases are not my meta keywords or descriptions and Google lands them on my home page even though the place that these words appear are on another section page.
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Are you saying the following :
1. For a search that you thought would be better served by page X, Google selected page Y?
2. The snippet that Google displayed came from a). the content of the page you thought should have been selected but wasn't, or b). the meta tags from the page you thought should have been selected?
In general, search engines select the text for display in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) based on either a). the description meta-tag content for the page, b). a combination of the search terms used and the actual content on the page, c). a description from a trusted directory such as DMOZ or Yahoo directory.
More often than not though the snippet is a combination of the search terms and the on page content so that the one doing the search can have a better idea of what a given page may have on it that is relevant.
In any event though, search engines decide for themselves what to display and when.