How is possible for a phrase in quotes to turn up way more web site pages than without??

As usual, dburk is right.
The numbers do not mean diddley when put in that "overall" context.
Google is a search engine. In fact, they created that concept and
ran with it. They pride themselves at not just coming up with
a bunch of pages, but a bunch of pages that matter, then a select
group of pages that matter to the searcher, then sifting that even
more to be just "meaningful" pages. Too many people put too much
stock in seeing something like "..found out of about 5,400,500 pages."
When there is no way google would ever even give a second
look at a fraction of those. And putting things in quotes does not
always work as intended. Again, google runs it through its search
engine brain and still tries to narrow it down. Even if you put things
in quotes, and put two words together, some results will have a space
because google thinks these are relevant for what you want. And many times the
overall stats don't match up with the all important ones that google
will emphasize. Remember as well that google will always say "out of about.."
There's a lot that happens behind the scenes when people search on
google. It's that behind the scenes stuff that makes google, well, google.

Paul