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I've now added this little tweak to the Description field as well, i.e.:
<meta name="description" content="<{$xoops_pagetitle}> at <{$xoops_meta_description}>" />
which suits the purposes of this particular site nicely. I found it troublesome to browse Google's page results and simply read the same description over and over again. This at least appends the article title to the beginning of the site-wide meta-description, which is slightly more, shall we say, descriptive. It's not ideal, however. It would be better to add a short "summary" or "abstract" field to the News module, defined by article writers at posting-time, which would replace the meta_description field when users (more specifically, search engine spiders) view an article. If I get around to doing it, I'll post it here. If someone beats me to it, please post it!
See this tweak in action here:
http://www.officediversions.com