Has anyone any experience of Google pulling through random meta descriptions.

[AndrewAkesson]

If you search "venn digital" then the correct meta description is pulled through, but if you search "venndigital" then it pulls through our twitter feed from the bottom of the page.

My only suggestion is that it is doing it because there is no mention of " Venn Digital" in the body of the copy, so it is going to the twitter feed at the bottom of the page where Venn Digital is mentioned to pull this info through.

[ofw12387]

I have the same problem, sometimes i optimize the metadescription to increase my CTR but google doesn´t want to show it.. grr

[donford]

Yep, seems Google treats the meta description tag as mere suggestion then anything else.

Very normal.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Andrew. Yes, Google has been known to pull other text for its results instead of what is in the meta description. Same goes for title tags as well. Like you've inferred, what they're trying to do is match their search result with the most applicable portion of text from what they deem the most relevant page.

Edit. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624 for Google's larger explanation of this process.  Cheers!