Let me start off by saying you can’t edit or control what Google displays in its SERPs. They control the format as well as what gets displayed and will determine when they should or should not display a listing a certain way.
Having said that you can do your best to influence what they display.
1) AFAIK you can’t have the date removed from the SERPs. Google shows that to show how fresh the content is. If you want the date to be more current then keep the content up to date.
2) To affect the description Google shows in their SERPs you can do the following (quoting Google):
The HTML suggestions page in Webmaster
Tools lists pages where Google has
detected missing or problematic meta
descriptions. (To see this page, click
Diagnostics in the left-hand menu of
the site Dashboard. Then click HTML
suggestions.)Differentiate the
descriptions for different pages.
Using identical or similar
descriptions on every page of a site
isn’t very helpful when individual
pages appear in the web results. In
these cases we’re less likely to
display the boilerplate text. Wherever
possible, create descriptions that
accurately describe the specific page.
Use site-level descriptions on the
main home page or other aggregation
pages, and use page-level descriptions
everywhere else. If you don’t have
time to create a description for every
single page, try to prioritize your
content: At the very least, create a
description for the critical URLs like
your home page and popular pages.Include clearly tagged facts in the
description. The meta description
doesn’t just have to be in sentence
format; it’s also a great place to
include structured data about the
page. For example, news or blog
postings can list the author, date of
publication, or byline information.
This can give potential visitors very
relevant information that might not be
displayed in the snippet otherwise.
Similarly, product pages might have
the key bits of information – price,
age, manufacturer – scattered
throughout a page. A good meta
description can bring all this data
together. For example, the following
meta description provides detailed
information about a book.<meta name="Description" content="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages">In this example,
information is clearly tagged and
separated.Programmatically generate
descriptions. For some sites, like
news media sources, generating an
accurate and unique description for
each page is easy: since each article
is hand-written, it takes minimal
effort to also add a one-sentence
description. For larger
database-driven sites, like product
aggregators, hand-written descriptions
can be impossible. In the latter case,
however, programmatic generation of
the descriptions can be appropriate
and are encouraged. Good descriptions
are human-readable and diverse, as we
talked about in the first point above.
The page-specific data we mentioned in
the second point is a good candidate
for programmatic generation. Keep in
mind that meta descriptions comprised
of long strings of keywords don’t give
users a clear idea of the page’s
content, and are less likely to be
displayed in place of a regular
snippet.Use quality descriptions.
Finally, make sure your descriptions
are truly descriptive. Because the
meta descriptions aren’t displayed in
the pages the user sees, it’s easy to
let this content slide. But
high-quality descriptions can be
displayed in Google’s search results,
and can go a long way to improving the
quality and quantity of your search
traffic.
3) If your pages contain certain content (reviews, people, businesses, events) you can use rich snippets to enhance the appearance of the descriptions in the SERPs.
4) If you want Google to show breadcrumbs for your pages use microdata.