I'm writing an engine for a website and I'm considering whether to add a field to let the author write a description of the page or not. If I decide to do this, it will be used as the meta description.
Google (and possibly other search engines) usually displays it in the search results, instead of the snippets. I'm wondering if that's a good thing or not.. The website will have fairly long articles, and while they can certainly be summarized in 2 lines maybe it's better if the user is shown the part relevant to his or her search query.
So, does using a meta description actually hurt?