If they were used in their originally-intended way, then yes
But what happened was that wise-guys would spam their meta-tags with all sorts of irrelevant key words in the hopes of getting people to come to their web page (even though the web page had no content that was actually relevant to what the user was looking for).
Google is used because users are able to find what they are looking for. If they find that sites they would have wanted to find are not listed on google, or their searches turn up too many irrelevant sites, they will start using some other search engine that gives them better results. This is why google has an incentive to "blacklist" sites that try to spam their way into peoples search results
Thanks for the information. Googling is one thing and trying to spam Google is another. Never in my wildest dreams would I think about attempting to spam Google. Google, Yahoo, Msn and some very obscure search engines camp out on my web site daily. It's getting kind of weird.