Meta Tags - What Are They and Which Search Engines Use Them? By Richard Zwicky. SearchGuild (Nov 28) Meta Tags are used in creating web pages to provide additional information about the page - author, description, keywords, perhaps copyright information. This article describes what they are and how to use them but doesn't identify which search engines use them. In general search engines don't use the metatag for retrieving or ranking results but may use it for the description.