lycos relevancy scoring - question

[SWEET MARIE]

I am preparing training material for staff in Keyword searching of 
Lycos, AltaVista, and Yahoo and have been doing my best to learn
as much about each.  In the process of experimenting, I have come upon
an odd situation in Lycos that I just don't understand:

I did a search for old time music in Lycos in its default form - 
(match any term, display 10, loose match, standard output).  The
first four have in their scoring 3 of 3 found.  After that, all
the hits have 2 of 3 found.  However, in hits 21-30, there are
some hits where all three words are noticeably present, even as 
far as being adjacent in the title.  

Can anyone help me with why this occurs?  I was wondering if a clue 
was in "Words Matched on Page:" that shows up in the detailed 
display.

I have looked in "Web Search Strategies" (book) and in the web4lib
archive and didn't find an answer.  Thanks in advance for any
information about these searhc results.

Barb

Barbara Kuhns
Dayton & Montgomery County Public Library
Dayton, OH
barb at dayton.lib.oh.us