Use a search engine and enter the following words: presidential candidates in 2016. Run the search and notice how many results appear. Now place quotation marks around the phrase and run the search again. Explain the difference in the results.

What will be an ideal response?

This exercise shows that searching for a phrase can produce dramatically different results compared to searching for all the words in the phrase. In a recent test, the initial search on Google produced 15,900,000 results, as shown here:







However, when the quotation marks were added, the search produced only 140,000 results, as shown in the following screen. In this case, searching on the quoted phrase narrowed the search significantly, because only sites that contained the specific phrase were identified.