The Google myths are good - there are some double negatives in there so read carefully lol! The original article is definitely worth a read though.
There were so many things here that Matt Cutts has aready talked about in great detail. Just watch his YouTube videos. For example, Matt talks about backlinks using :link. It is, as someone here already mentioned, simply a sample. If you want a complete list of backlinks, you can get these from Webmaster Tools. He does on to talk about possible abuse as it relates to anyone being able to reverse engineer your backlink strategy. Metatags and descriptions Google does indeed use. They didn't use to, as they'd always use their own description. These days, they do actually trust some of meta data. In other words. Watch Matts vids, or read his blog. There's good stuff there.