MSN Search features hand-crafted results?

My review on MSN Search elicited the following response from MSN Search’s Weblog:

Angsuman Chakraborty thinks that we released the Beta too early. He also questions the veracity of our site descriptions. I want to respond to this by re-iterating that there is no human intervention in our Index; all results are based on our algorithms.

In response I posted to the same weblog:

# re: One week out and here’s a roundup
Angsuman Chakraborty
> I want to respond to this by re-iterating that there is no human intervention in our Index; all results are based on our algorithms.

I am happy to know that.
What bothers me is that certain sites seems to have rather strange description, something which is definitely not derived from its contents or meta tags. An example which I quoted there for Oracle -
“Silicon Valley software giant supplies applications for enterprise information management. Features demos and upgrade downloads.”

It is however not so with many other sites. I can clearly see that it normally places a great emphasis on meta tags, specially the description tag to provide summary information.

As you said it is based on algorithms. I don’t disagree with that. However I wonder if the algorithms take as its input some text file (or other information source) which contains specific instructions & descriptions regarding some selected sites

The reason for this assumption is because certain site descriptions are clearly not content based.

Looking forward to your thoughts on this.

Sometime has passed since the review, so I decided to take a look again at MSN Search.

I looked back again at the old query “Sun” and here’s what I got MSN search.

Sun Microsystems

Developer of the Java language offers information on new products, and update information on existing ones.

However on www.sun.com the description is:

Sun Microsystems, Inc. The Network Is The Computer[tm].

Nowhere on the site is the verbiage (or even anything remotely near to it) that is used in your query result summary.

I did a google search and couldn’t find anywhere similar description about Sun. It is a common knowledge that Sun is a hardware company. It is the creator of Java. However that is not how you would primarily define Sun!

Interestingly if you search about my company or many other sites, you will get a description taken from the meta tag description. It is obvious that the meta tag is given undue importance by MSN Search Beta, unlike Google. However this rule is flouted for certain sites like Sun, Oracle etc.

Am I wrong in assuming that MSN Search query summary for certain sites are written by humans (and often with incorrect understanding of the industry, or is it intentional?), which is then picked by search engine algorithm in preference to automatically generated summary?

You decide. Let me know your thoughts.