In June and July, Lycos, who claims approximately 30,000,000 unique visitors a month, played around quite a bit, using its own crawler, Inktomi results, and FAST Search.

They settled on a combination of Inktomi and FAST Search to power the "Web Sites" part of the results. The rest of the results are the responsibility of ODP, FAST Search, and DirectHit.

They are, by all accounts, preparing Lycos' spider to work specifically for a new section, specialty collections which will be appearing as part of Lycos.

Their other search property, HotBot, will not be affected by all this.

If you do a search, the results start out with a section labeled "Popular." This is made up of content from within the Lycos network that editors have deemed relevant to a particular search, or if there is no editor data, Direct Hit provides the results. If Direct Hit information is providing the information, the Direct Hit logo appears at the bottom of the results page.

For extremely popular search terms, Lycos gives links in to other types of searching you can do with the Lycos network, such as for MP3 files, pictures or official homepages.

In the section labeled "Web Sites," results come from the the Open Directory, FAST or from T-Rex, the Lycos crawler.

It is rumored that the freshness of the Open Directory information will be improving over the next couple of weeks when they plan to start using the ODP updates more often.