What is the current state of play with the keywords and descriptions meta tags?

According to what is now an old article on SearchEngineWatch, only one search engine still uses them. That article is a few years out of date.

- Do any of the major search engines still use them? If so which?
- Am I right in saying 25 words for keywords is a good limit and 200-250 characters for description?
- If NO major search engines use them, are there any other reasons for having them? Do any other web technologies use them for any reason? e.g. for those with disabilities, to give them a quick overview of a page?

Thanks,
Stephen

Google using the Meta Description as a forced desciber for the page [but if it carries any weighing at all it is extremely small.

On all web site pages 'I remove them' first for the above reason - I don't believe a "forced description" is all the valuable since multiple phrases can return the same page in results and in many instances the Meta can be "out of context".

Secondly - I'm a firm believer in "snippets" - you can control what snippet appears for a page simply by the way you arrange the content on the page.

Third - I'm a firm believer in "code blot" - dumping everything "off the page" that can be dropped [all together or in external files e.g. CSS, Javascript, etc.] seems to have an impact [much more difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt].

The meta description tag is still indexed and sometimes used as the description that appears in the SERPs. Most the time however, the engines will use a snippet of content from your actual pages. It doesn't hurt however to still use unique meta descriptions on your pages.

The meta keyword tag is all but useless. It is still indexed by Yahoo and Ask but not Google or MSN. However I think it has very little relevance. It can be useful for targeting mis-spellings of words or very niche words as long as there is not much competition for those words elsewhere.

So overall it is still useful to include them? It doesn't do any harm?

Stephen