Like I said at the bottom of the OP, if you look at the bottom of your result, the search terms will be broken into date ranges, and you can get actual examples in each. This can help explain anachronisms like the high volume of results for "Google" in the early 1900's. Turns out most of those are referencing the popular cartoon strip "Barney Google" or are referencing actual people whose last name was Google. Even earlier references use it in phrases like "google-eyed".
The crazy high occurrence of "pwned" in the early 1800's looks to be mostly OCR errors, where a text has the word "owned" and a speck or distortion of the "o" caused it to be indexed as "p". Older texts are more likely to have printing errors, page artefacts, and/or OCR-unfriendly typefaces.
Another problem I've noticed is incorrect dating, either by Google or people using Google Books' self-publishing tools. For instance, I found a "book" on tricks to making money as an eBay seller that the author had published using Google Books, and then put their birth year as the publication year, 1966.
Also, it's case-sensitive, but searching capitalized words will return some results that aren't capitalized. Can't figure out what the trigger is.
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Topic: Google Ngrams (Read 7879 times)