Quotes are *very* important in Unix. You should probably read up on them because the way you quote anything, using single quotes, double quotes, backticks and/or any combination of these can produce completely different results.
In this example, not quoting $result, causes the shell to perform variable expansion on $result, the resulting string is then tokenised using the values held in the environment variable $IFS ( by default a space, a tab and a newline ). Effectively, this means that all the spaces, tabs and newlines in $result would be lost and replaced with a single space. Using quotes would cause $result to be treated as a single token, thus retaining the embedded spaces, tabs and newlines.
e.g.
$ var="a
$ b
$ c"
$ echo $var
a b c
$ echo "$var"
a
b
c